I suppose if someone thought this, they would not have dared saying it?

Many do make horrible UI, but would react poorly to criticism, hard to know before ..

Many programmers think they can cheat their way into designing a good UI, they just think it's just enough for you to learn and use a GUI framework, and place the widgets in a "good enough" way.

Just look at the monstruosity that is the GUI version of wget, it's the epitome of programmers with no UX background trying to make a GUI application.