The user's problem is a textbook case of a tool that works great until it doesn't, and then leaves you stranded. That's not a failure of the user, it's a failure of design.
Here we have someone who knows enough to use TEXTSPLIT, who understands spill ranges, and who has even tried creative workarounds like adding double hyphens. But the tool cannot handle the simplest edge case: a single entry with no delimiter. Instead of a clean result, you get an empty cell or a broken formula. The user asks for #N/A errors on unused slots, which is a reasonable request. It means they want predictable, inspectable output, not silent gaps that break downstream logic.
This is the kind of friction that makes spreadsheet work feel brittle. You learn one pattern, it works for ten cases, and then case eleven reveals a hidden assumption baked into the function. The user is not asking for much. They want a function that behaves consistently whether the input contains one item or ten. That is a baseline expectation, not a premium feature.
What this tells us is that legacy spreadsheet tools still treat edge cases as exceptions rather than scenarios to design for. The user adapted, tried a workaround, and hit another wall. That is not empowerment, that is troubleshooting masquerading as productivity. A tool that truly understands data should not require users to invent patchwork logic for something as fundamental as splitting text.
The practical takeaway is simple. If you find yourself writing conditional formulas to handle the absence of a delimiter, you are working around the tool, not with it. The right solution should let you define the delimiter and the fallback behavior in one step, no empty cells, no manual padding, no workarounds. Until that is standard, users will keep spending time fixing tools instead of using them.