"The "user"? Stop calling me that: I'm a person, a living breathing person, with feelings." - Oh please. "Well, that ay be good for machines, but what about w

"The "user"? Stop calling me that: I'm a person, a living breathing person, with feelings." - Oh please. "Well, that ay be good for machines, but what about what is good for people? People are bad at precision and accuracy." - Which is why the computer has to be very conservative, and not go off trying to decipher what the user meant, and doing things the user probably didn't intend. There's then the issue of how sensitive the operation is. It's ok for a google search to autocorrect your search. It's probably not a good idea to use corrective heuristics in a nuclear missile silo. "A truly collaborative system would tell me the requirements before I did the work." - Yes, and soon enough you'll have to digest tomes of information (which nobody will read) before you can even use the system. "the machine was designed wrong, demanding that we conform to its peculiar requirements." The machine was designed with certain assumptions in place and compromises made so that it could actually be shipped out the door. It is made up of software that was designed under similar principles. That software, in turn, was made up of other software components, etc. What you're asking for is a ground-up redesign of "the perfect system", for which (1) there's no such thing, (2) there never can be such a thing, and (3) were such a thing even possible, it would be ridiculously expensive and would never ship because it would never be ready.