> 3) My hypothesis of why German IT products are almost always horrible is that they're rarely thinking from customer's (or developer's!) perspective. They may be proud of some specs of their products but the overall thing is then often just a bunch of related subsystems "pragmatically" tied up with some duct tape.

While that is commonly true, I've also found that driving a modern Audi or a Mercedes is still much better thought out from UX and comfort perspective in comparison to many vehicular products from Sillicon Valley collaborators. Software might be a bit laggy, but many times there are plenty of nice user respecting features that you won't find in modern agile products (basic operations like "reroute me around this closed road" or opening a glove compartment are stupidly complicated or impossible on brilliantly developed products like Tesla).

The Germans also have one other benefit: my car UI doesn't just randomly completely change with updates like Android Auto or Tesla UI does. I'm not a guniea pig for some product manager trying to get his promotion with redesigns.

There has to be a balance somewhere between the dinosaur process of German brands and coked up 5-second attention spam of Sillicon Valley products.