"usually because it isn't a priority or interest for them" is the real sticking point. In order to make a really good UI you have to make sacrifices. A lot of t

"usually because it isn't a priority or interest for them" is the real sticking point. In order to make a really good UI you have to make sacrifices. A lot of them. All the time. Your time, for one thing. Most of your good ideas, the ones that you really liked...will end up not quite working, and need to be abandoned. Especially the really cool ones. That back-end that you wrote so elegantly? Well there's a critical use-case that requires you to write in a section of special-cased inelegance. Or, even worse, in developing the UI you realize that it really, really needs this feature...which will unfortunately require you to redesign your backend architecture. Most engineers who set out to "make the UI" aren't willing to make those sacrifices, so you get a crappy UI. That's not meant to insult engineers, because they have plenty of other things to worry about. But unless you take it truly, painfully seriously, all you get is shit.