I love trakt. And I love TMDB. I contribute a lot to TMDB and think it is much better of a site and a community and more user friendly than TVDB. I understand that TVDB probably has a more comprehensive database for series compared to TMDB (I think TV shows are only a fairly recent addition to TMDB). However, contributing to TVDB is much more arduous than to TMDB, especially when it comes to getting incorrect data changed. The TVDB forum is fairly dead and slow to respond, me as a user have no idea if they keep track of our contributions.

Anyway, is there any reason why Trakt doesn't use episode information (especially air dates) from TMDB if they don't exist on it's respective entry on TVDB? Could this happen (any time soon- i.e. in the next couple of years)?

I'm an Android user and I've often searched for native apps that integrate with Trakt but I always end up returning to the Trakt website itself because it offers more features, is more robust & also is quite quick.

For a better integration into the OS I always add the website to my homescreen to have the Chrome bar removed and have a separate entry in the Recents with the Trakt icon.

Now over the last few years/months Google has improved upon this simple add to home screen feature and offered "deeper" integration.

For example PWAs can show up in the app drawer (not just as a shortcut on the home screen).
PWAs get an own "App info" screen where we can manage notifications, permissions, storage among other settings.

A good example of this would be the Twitter's PWA.

Also the current Trakt web app shows a small Chrome icon in a corner which those other web app don't anymore.

I'm not exactly sure how these features can be activated but it should be fairly simple.

There is a TVDB bug where a show's start date is not being pulled from the date of the first episode

so on Trakt if you sort a watchlist by "Release date" you get a load of shows listed at the top of the list which have no date.

Some of them have no start date as they haven't been announced which is fair enough, but others have begun and are running now, or even finished their season.

i've spotted references to it on the TVDB forums referring to a bug that is not updating the Release Date to the first aired date of the first episode.

Is there any way Trakt can switch their listed "Release date" to use the first aired date of the first episode. rather than the broken "release date" of the TVBD

tvdb forum referenses to the bug:
https://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=53311&p=142927
https://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=52997&p=142182

Reelgood, Trakt's (primary?) "Watch Now" data partner, could possibly provide this information somehow with an update to the existing two-way sync feature, if implementing Trakt's own UI for it isn't feasible due to available dev time etc.

The main use cases I see are filtering lists and other views to show only content the user has access to through a service subscription, and prioritizing which two "Watch Now" buttons get the prime slot below the poster image on pages where that applies. (Right now, even shows that are available on e.g. Hulu display Amazon & iTunes purchase options there, forcing the user to open the "Watch Now" modal to access the streaming option they already pay for.)

See https://support.trakt.tv/forums/188762-general/suggestions/17409505-filter-based-on-watch-now-services-that-i-subscr for a related idea (the first use case).