The very fact that Intuit has clearly invested money into making a beautiful interface for a tax program, a program that people use once a year, just goes to show how profitable the current arrangement is for them, and how determined they are to keep the average taxpayer from switching to any competing tax filing ecosystem.
It is well designed to hold you by the hand if you just go down the happy-path of what a user who has all their documents in hand when the right question pops up on the screen.
It's poorly designed for people who want to go back, people who just want to input their forms, and people who value their time. There is no reason each question needs to take up its own screen, instead of being a list. There is no reason it needs to pretend to calculate for 15 seconds after every few questions.
I get absurd cosmetic delays and animations, text that's tweaked to be so pale and thin that it disappears in some browsers, and tedious wizard-style workflow that you have to traverse half a dozen times when the vague language doesn't match the data on your forms. And don't get me started on confusing between "activities" (that's the official term, not Intuit's fault) because there's no way to see where you are in the process or show an overview until the end, and the final result is in a different format that I can't reconcile with what I filled in.
It's really not. It's hard to keep track of where you are in your return and easy to get lost. You can't paste into any credential field for fetching information from your bank or other outside data source.
Example: I know every year there is no way my itemized deductions will exceed the standard deduction. But there is no clear way to tell TurboTax to stop wasting my time on itemized deductions.
And it's shocking how bad some of the QBO integrations are, especially for newish technologies. Intuit even screwed up PayPal in a way that some accountants don't want to use it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT5zKWBXtQU), forcing a labor intensive manual process.