Just to share the terminology, under underlying stuff I mean the linux kernel, the JVM, etc, while higher level stuff could be certain build tools (khm, looking at you npm), and of course end user tools that are unfortunately way too buggy. Like I have a hard time listing end user applications where I didn’t notice a bug yet.

Give me a tight, highly coherent API, with a culture of avoiding feature factory work. At least get "Make it work, make it right, make it fast" to not skip "make it right" anymore. That's sort of the core illness in software today.

Open source doesn't have to be pushed by business concerns. There's a degree of regulatory capture, but the biggest problem is that we just don't know any better. We repeat what we see, and make sure our own pain points are handled. I've seen this play out in API design where an awful API is introduced, and each person who fixes it only fixes 20% of the pain, and so it's 10 years before we get from a mediocre library to one you could actually call 'good', because nobody made 'good', they made better than better than better than ridiculous.