> The thing is, they provided a large, under-educated user base with powerful, complex and utterly sophisticated tools.

Do you think the expensive manufacturers don’t do that? I’ve seen un-configured, un-updated, EoL Cisco equipment. Small businesses get sold it because it’s “the best”, but they don’t actually need anything nearly that complicated and don’t want to pay the ongoing costs so you end up with things like managed switches being used like you’d use a dumb switch that’s 1/10th of the price.