Doesn’t the fact you do use it mean the customer (the one who chooses the vendor) did not care, though?

If you're in one place for more than a few years, you become the person making these choices, and you don't forget.

That's obviously different because at the corp level there are politics involved in choosing one vendor over another, but at the same time wheverer I'm involved in the decision process I care to avoid these products as hell.

Choices of vendor are not binary. There are tradeoffs between available solutions in software. Software Quality is not a linear gradient.

If your solution is the best compromise, it is more likely to be selected.

Well at companies is much less compromise than politics. Over decaces I saw two main schemas:

- product must be purchased because its vendor is somehow connected to the upper management or the investor

- product must be purchased because the person who has chosen the product is at the moment perceived as having some kind of holy cow status and can't be criticized, so people around put that to the extreme

Happening at most of companies everywhere.