Quality is a cost, and users don’t generally pay for the marginal value of a less buggy app, they pay for the massive value of the categorical problem being solved.
You sat there for two hours viewing a single directory, clearly making the page faster doesn’t mean you’ll use their service more, so why should they make it snappier?
Do they get the choice to?
It's not like I can get a less buggy version of MS Windows by paying an extra $20.
And while many open source projects accept donations, and many enterprise products offer support contracts, it's not like $20 gets you a guaranteed bug fix.
I agree with your point that companies don't always have a good business case to produce quality software - but we can hardly blame customers for not buying things we aren't selling :)
Yes. At least somewhat. There's a reason lots of competing products become popular, e.g. Google Sheets taking some of the popularity of Excel. New features like live sync actually matter. And to the extent that users actually care about quality, software with better quality will evenutally also win.
I mean, I'm using an iPhone. I'm using a Mac. I'm paying a huge premium over someone on Android and Windows. I do it largely for the quality of the Apple ecosystem.
But yes, there are still problems. The world of products is hard. :)
For an open source project, consider what it would cost to hire a contractor to implement the fix and get it to a state where the fix would be accepted by the project.
In a lot of cases, the customers aren't buying it, it's "free" (the cost being not monetary but elsewhere) and no new entrants can compete with the giant piles of cash the incumbents are sitting on
It has mainly settled at a local maximum. The software is good enough, money is tight, the priorities are different and procedures are bureaucratic.
Switching to new and better software means, first making it a priority. The procedure for larger schools also mean getting legal on board, writing an invitation to tender, etc.