I think consumers are trapped in a feedback loop precipitated by the rise of ad-driven software. From the perspective of an engineer, "consumers don't care abou

I think consumers are trapped in a feedback loop precipitated by the rise of ad-driven software. From the perspective of an engineer, "consumers don't care about quality" — but what's really happening is that consumers have no reason to trust the quality of the software they use. Grab a person off the street and ask them about how they feel about the quality of the software they use at work, at home, on their phones, and I bet they would be quite unhappy with it, but feel that this is just the way software is. What consumer would risk paying £100 for software when they expect it to suck anyway? Without a demand for good software, suppliers are constrained to turn to alternate value streams like retention or data collection, creating worse experience for the users, and perpetuating the cycle. So this is all you say that you can't look at the market at a surface level and immediately draw conclusions about what people fundamentally value, because the structure of the market is path-dependent. What may seem like end-users caring or not caring about something might be more of a reflection of choices made within systemic constraints.