Were they able to trade their passion for goods and services?

I think you're conflating two different things. On the one hand you have how a product is made, and on the other there is the demand for it which will affect how the product is made. In the case of software these two things are unfortunately broadly disconnected for a number of reasons.

First, hardware has improved consistently, outpacing any need for optimal software. Second, the end user does not know what they really want from software until it is provided to them, so most people will easily put up with slow, laggy and buggy software until there is a competitor that can provide a better experience. In other words, if companies can make money from making bad software, they will, and this is often what happens because most people don't know any different and also hardware becomes more and more powerful which alleviates and masks the defects in software.

I think there is also another big factor, which is that businesses prefer to scale by adding more people, rather than by making better software. Because they want to scale along human engineers, they tend to prefer low-tier software that is easy to pick up by the masses, rather than the high-level specialized software that is a hard skill to acquire. This is understandable, but is also the reason why software is so slow in advancing forward compared to hardware (and by the same token, hardware engineers require more specialization).