The opening paragraphs about how people enamoured by a shiny gadget will overlook a terrible interface brings immediately to my mind the modern day LLMs.
I also don't love your mapping of this observation onto modern LLMs. The interface of an LLM is natural language text, along with some files written in plain text or markdown. Can it be improved? Undoubtedly! But as a baseline, it doesn't seem half bad to me. If it is so terrible, it should not be hard to propose an interface that will be significantly more productive. Can you?
That's just a taste judgement, and you can decide the interface sucks on a one of a kind item quite easily, and people often do.