The average user doesn't need to understand software. The average programmer doesn't either, unless they're developing it. That's kind of the point, software

The average user doesn't need to understand software. The average programmer doesn't either, unless they're developing it. That's kind of the point, software encapsulates a process so you don't have to do it. In 2011, we didn't have SSDs(Or at least I sure didn't) compilers were not as good, and people said "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" way too much. I'm willing to tolerate just about any amount of complexity if it's well factored, reliable, performance, and the abstractions aren't leaky. Even for very small tasks... Because chances are, if I'm bothering to use software for a small task, it's because it's something I do every day and it's fairly important. If it drags in 10 million lines of code from 1000 devs to make sure my notes app syncs reliably without manual intervention.... then that's fine. Almost all hardware still in use seems to be fast enough. We have built amazing things with software. The only thing I don't like is that the FOSS scence has a tendancy to be less innovative and more Kackzynki, and all the cool stuff is proprietary cloudware. That, and that things are getting harder and harder to develop. Not even because the languages or APIs are hard, those are amazing these days, it's that you have 50 layers of DevOps nightmare time with Docker to get a hello world running because everything is microservicy, and developers have a high amount of tolerance for manual setup, and programmers really think it's worth breaking a whole ecosystem just to rename a function. "Getting started with X" used to be a half a page, now it's 5 pages. I have a lot more complaints about hardware than software. Almost everything has a few missing things that would only cost a few dollars to add. Limiting charging to 80% to save battery, reporting status on Bluetooth, a tiny metal ring to protect the plastic bit that wears, a cheap molded case instead of sharp sheet metal that collects dents...