Your wording is odd but this is a great point.

Software is rubbish across the consumer space: TVs, DVDs, home routers. To interact with, it feels like somebody has scraped some functions together in assembly to meet a broad requirement, and then left it as soon as they could get away with it.

I expect the projects are hardware-driven. The movers and shakers care about the hardware, and design this first. Then some hardware-oriented guy get the short straw and is told "build a software layer on this technology to fill these checkboxes". The result is the unresponsive, buggy, hard-to-use rubbish that we get in our consumer devices.

I think companies would need to take a different approach to device design to get around this.

This is probably because broken stuff gets fixed. Mediocre stuff limps on forever.