My guess beyond pure historical baggage is that it is hard to produce user experiences that are simple, powerful and produce consistent data at the same time. A

My guess beyond pure historical baggage is that it is hard to produce user experiences that are simple, powerful and produce consistent data at the same time. Also, niche software will always be worse than top notch game UX. Games work because they often gradually ramp the difficulty of the problems and the applied solutions up in a very controlled way using tutorial levels, clever world design etc. This means you learn the thing without even thinking you learn it. It would definitly be possible to do such a thing in a GIS tool and have the user do some fictional work first until they reached a certain level of proviciency and then throw them at the real data. But without tutorializing either you trust the user and give them powerful and simple tools and live with the broken data they produce (akin to button mashing in a fighting game) or you restrict the data that can be produced and frustrate the users because they cannot get the things done they want to get done. In the end the quality of UX is always a money thing. A game with bad UX won't sell. A niche GIS software coded by three racoons in a trenchcoat will sell, even of the UX is from the stone age — as long as all other GIS tools are on a similar level.