> Current mobile software really sucks in pretty much every way and there's nothing more to be said

I don't know what perspective you are coming at this from, but from my experience with non-technical iOS users, installing/managing/removing mobile software in a safe manner is a much better experience than compared to their PC's. My grandparents are fully capable of managing software on their iPhones - if I asked them to do the same on Linux...

If safety for noobs is the rationale then why can't they ship iOS with a deep down hidden switch that allows side-loading?

To keep out the noobs they could make it require a command line tool and display an extra scary warning and have it void the warranty.

I don't see why we should all need to suffer because of the majority's ignorance.

Recent changes to iOS allow side-loading[1]. In answer to your point about the majority's ignorance, I suspect the reasons are varied but if there's a way to circumvent these kind of protections, non-technical users can be coerced into doing so. An example is Facebook disabling the developer console in the browser after users were coerced into using it against themselves[2].

[1] http://bouk.co/blog/sideload-iphone/ [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21692646/how-does-faceboo...

While that might be true in theory, in practice app stores aren't much safer then Linux package managers are.