Fully agree. The problems are hard, the interested talent is limited (who would want to work on line of business software when academia actively pushes people towards other things), and the problem space (all possible online business configurations) is immense.

Re:frontend, you're absolutely correct. Magento's frontend is a sad state. MageOS is actively looking for ways to move Luma/Blank into a separate installable package so that devs are not forced to see it at every turn.

In terms of Headless, there are a bunch of different heads at this point, but none have yet solved what I call the "upgrade-safe theme" problem.

I like what we've done with Daffodil since it doesn't impose any of those limitations that come with themes, while still handling a lot of the complexity that devs face when building ecommerce stores.