I feel this so much. The statement "Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general." hits home so hard.

I feel like every application I purchase or download or try to setup is unsatisfying and flawed in some way. I paid $30/mo for access to the EastWest Composer cloud and was excited because I had spent most of my music production career hearing people talk about this near-infinite library of amazing sounds that professional producers use and I was about to have access to it. Then I downloaded their plugin and it was dreadful. Crashed regularly, I never actually got it fully working even after working with support for a month or so.

It feels like everything is like that now adays. Most pieces of software that I use I just immediately learn to smooth over the errors in one way or another. A reboot before creating each new project, etc.

It even works into a lot of hardware things because they need software too. I paid $500+ for a gopro MAX and the GoPro app has been the biggest nightmare in trying to use that device. Plus the firmware is dreadful and the wifi tech they use to connect is clunky.

It depresses me too. I feel like I can't even spend money to find a solution anymore and it feels like I end up throwing my money away more often than not because I buy something and it's clunky and awful but I can make it work so I use it sometimes but I could be getting so much more for that money if they had spent time refining the software.