I completely agree. The observation is less useful when looking at how Quickbooks is/was built and more useful from the viewpoint of building a Quickbooks compe

I completely agree. The observation is less useful when looking at how Quickbooks is/was built and more useful from the viewpoint of building a Quickbooks competitor. Just fixing broken UI interaction patterns isn't going to be successful. If you want to beat Quickbooks, you need to either replace the accountants that small businesses use entirely or offer those accountants a significantly better value proposition than Intuit does. Because what they have now is working and their livelihoods depend on it. They have processes in place that are built around Quickbooks. The status quo works, so you almost need to be revolutionarily better to overcome that level of friction.