QCD, from its inception to its stubbornly unsolved problems

Whenever one has witnessed some event and then sees it reported in the media, one's reaction is the same: "it was not quite like that". It is in this spirit of a frequent first-hand witness that I write this article. I discuss a few selected points which --to my judgement-- illustrate well the QCD evolution (in time) from the theoretical, phenomenological and experimental points of view.
Comment: Submitted for publication in IJMPA. 40 pages, 27 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1610.07466, arXiv:hep-ph/0404215