Smart people are a surprisingly small minority.
"No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." - H. L. Mencken
I know plenty of people, myself included, who lost money overestimating peoples intelligence.
Everything nice that they offer eventually gets changed or taken away.
Yes, I'm bitter. We could have a much better world, one that actually empowers anyone willing to step up to the plate, but instead we grab all the low-hanging fruit so we can make them smile and step on workers' rights to deliver them burritos, instead.
A happy cohort is an obedient cohort, amiright?
So the real market is for the very smart people and that’s an even smaller minority.
I built super advanced tech but was intentionally screwed over by my large corporate customers, just because they could, so I quit the industry and that super advanced tech doesn’t exist anymore. Unfortunately a lot of really cool things will live and die with me. I’ve fought the good fight and failed.
We can lament that people are not smarter but there isn’t anything we can do about it.
Learning is hard, it makes people uncomfortable, sadly. Which means that the easy road is to stoop to their level, which is what we're seeing.
It sucks that you got screwed by large corporations, and I don't know the story, but that sounds more like standard business fuckery than "software for smart people"?
Certainly the businesses were not as smart as they thought they were, which is a common problem. But they indeed have very hard valuable problems and basically everyone involved was much smarter than the average person. Just not smart enough to know their own limitations and accept outside help.