No. I want to send my kid to the local school that will be good and I want to go to the local hospital where I will be treated by a well qualified caring medical professional. I don't want to have to create pivot tables.

That's assuming there's a universal "good" - even if a school meets some general standards one school can have a better arts program, the other might be more biased towards sports, etc. I don't see anything wrong with having choice - having a good baseline everywhere is a separate issue.

I mean they like football, but they also like drawing, but then neither of those are well known for paying the bills. So I still circle back making sure they get a balanced education.

The problem though is that choice is the supposed solution to not having good schools. That may be UK specific though.

Yeah, people mostly start asking for control when you make the default experience shitty. They want control to escape the hell they've been put in, but they have to pay a price for it either in money or time. So functionally, "give users more control" is really saying "make the user pay more to use my product."

In an ideal world everything would be bespoke and custom tailored for me, but the idea there is that the tailor knows how to create what I want. Not that I have to go tailoring all my own stuff. I'm not competent enough to do that unless it's my hobby.

OTOH, if "user control" is seen as table stakes or baseline, it can limit the shittiness level that users will tolerate by lowering switching costs.