Essential phone connects as a USB 2.0 device on some USB 3.0 ports

[The Sarge]

On my custom-built PC based on an Asus Maximus VIII Hero motherboard with a Core i7-6700K CPU, if I connect the Essential Phone to my front USB 3.0 ports then USBDeview shows it as a USB 2.0 device, but on the back ports it shows it as a USB 3.1 device. Shouldn't be possible because all of those ports are running off the same Intel USB host controller and the same Intel root hub. What the hell is going on here? Just to be sure, I tested all my ports with a USB 3.1 flash drive and a USB 3.0 HDD enclosure and they all show up as USB 3.1, even the ports two on the hubs built into the back of my monitors.(Because the USB IF made a stupid naming decision, there is no way for USBDeview to tell if a device is USB 3.1 Gen 1 or 3.1 Gen 2. All the idiots at the USB IF in charge of naming things had to to was call it USB 4.0 instead of USB 3.1-Gen-2 but no, now we have to put up with their stupidity).
And no, before some joker asks, I am not plugging it into the USB 2.0 ports. I know the difference, I'm not that stupid.
What I'm asking is, why is my Essential Phone seeing the same host controller as two different USB speeds?

 

[Rukbat]

Probably the same reason my Pixel 2 sees the front ports as 3.0 (and won't flash from them) and the rear ports as 2.1 (and works fine). IPIO or some little glitch no one is aware of yet.

(As for naming, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.12 would have solved that - and if it's limited to 3 characters in some places, 312 for 3.1 Gen 2. [We'll never get to USB version 312 while we're still using primitive things like computers.] But they don't ask us, do they?)

 

[The Sarge]

Probably the same reason my Pixel 2 sees the front ports as 3.0 (and won't flash from them) and the rear ports as 2.1 (and works fine). IPIO or some little glitch no one is aware of yet.

What does IPIO mean? Oh, and there's no such thing as USB 2.1. Just saying.

(As for naming, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.12 would have solved that - and if it's limited to 3 characters in some places, 312 for 3.1 Gen 2. [We'll never get to USB version 312 while we're still using primitive things like computers.] But they don't ask us, do they?)

>>>VENT<<< The problem came when they gave us two different names for the same thing. USB 3.0 is the same thing as USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.1 is the same thing as USB 3.1 Gen 2. So now there's confusion over that. Plus in some cases (a lot of cases actually) USB 3.0 is being DELIBERATELY mislabeled as USB 3.1 because technically it is USB 3.1, they're just conveniently omitting the "Gen 1" part in order to confuse the consumer into thinking they're getting a real USB 3.1 port when they're really getting a USB 3.0 port. NONE OF THIS chicanery would have been possible if they had gone with a purely sequential naming convention: 3.0, 4.0, 5.0; Simple, easy, impossible to confuse one for the other. A .x revision step should be reserved for MINOR revisions, not major revisions. Every programer knows that and every engineer should too, so WTF USB IF!?
What's worse, there are multiple different ways to implement USB 3.1 because there are multiple optional standards and there's nobody enforcing any of that. For example, USB Power Delivery 2.0 (USB PD) is entirely optional when it should have been mandatory at least for host devices that have plenty of power to support it (like PCs and powered hubs). USB cables can support PD or not, so if you have two devices and both of them have ports that support USB PD but your cable doesn't then you are SOL. And the devices can't tell you what standards the ports support unless you have some very obscure and specialised software so most users are in the dark about all of this: If you have two devices and you don't know if either of them support which standard then you also don't know if it's the fault of the cable or the device(s). Now you have to **** around troubleshooting but all you'll probably get is frustrated.
In other words, The USB IF should have made ALL that standards they developed for USB 3.0 and USB 4.0 MANDATORY across all devices. That would have meant that USB type-C would ONLY support USB 4.0 and would ALWAYS support USB PD; no possibly of confusion, no possibility of interoperability problems, end of story.
Instead we have a nightmare and it only gets worse when you factor in Thunderbolt 3 and Display Port compatibility.>>>END VENT<<<