Nokia: I don't think that the things you say about their reputation is true (for German), in Germany Nokia phones had carrier crapware like all the other phones too.
Vodafone went as far as commissioning handsets directly from co-operative manufacturers and this changed the game completely as the message was heard that unless you play their game you aren't getting sold.
Only the deal Apple got from AT&T remotely affected this status quo. Android was originally designed for precisely the kind of operator customisation we're complaining about, as is Firefox OS, but it's only thanks to Apple (and I loathe the way iOS has gone) that we have any choice about this stuff at all. The fact it took them to stir things up is justifiably embarrassing to the telecoms industry.
Nokia's reputation of old in Europe was based on the fact for a long time they were the only manufacturer to tell operators to [guess] themselves and sell relatively clean devices to end users. In the US they never did this, with the result that they never really got traction in that market. With MMS this started to change, to the point one device whenever you selected send message it actually went to the MMS option in the menu, and you'd have to scroll to text message, because the operators had asked to encourage MMS usage as they charged loads for it.