Relevant:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/There's a recent DEFCON talk too:
Simply capitalism at work. If you don't like big shitty software that's expensive, or hidden fees in purchases, or exponentially rising costs on monopoly or otherwise noncompetitive services whether regionally or globally, or big public projects that inevitably cost exponentially more than their estimates like high-speed rail, or your very tax dollars being siphoned away for frivolous bank bailouts and corporate welfare... then you must be nothing but a filthy commie!
...
The most direct alternative, in this case -- unfortunate or not as it may be -- is direct anarchism: software has the unique ability to exist independent of money, at least above the basic minimum to operate on the internet at all (which it seems we aren't escaping any time soon, but given that we need it for many basic services, capitalist or otherwise, this use comes for free on top of all that). In other words, free software. So, if you have programming talent, and the patience (or tolerance..) to join a large software project, go contribute to KiCAD, for zero cost and benefit (personally and financially; or maybe not, if you have a Patreon or etc.!), and make the world a slightly less shitty place!
The misfortune of course being, such civic responsibility is woefully rare these days; you certainly won't see it on a mass scale, democracy is tenuous enough these days, let alone the massive change in attitude that would be required to support anything like the libertarian to anarchist "small government" ideal some fantasize about (without that simply devolving to the authoritarian hellscape that it inevitably becomes at-scale). But in small projects (on the grand scheme of things; thousands of contributors, perhaps), enough people can be gotten together, if maybe not to make unilateral progress towards some particular goal, then at least to evolve it outward and onward.
Hence you might have oddball features that are not quite what you're expecting given the project's general scope, and with quirky UI or whatever that's somewhat characteristic of whatever subset of developers created it, or are responsible for it. Inhomogeneity is one of the prices we pay, as users of FOSS. Not to say corporate projects aren't susceptible to similar dynamics, mind, but more that they
can direct more strongly, and cut offending features entirely if they so desire, without anyone else having to weigh in on the decision. Most stark of all, they can simply stop selling, or developing, and the project grinds to a halt; the same is patently impossible for FOSS, as long as the codebase is available, and being actively developed somewhere.
Or, the existence of projects that are nigh-unusable at all; a lot of small projects are one-offs that the developer(s) found helpful, maybe just once upon a time even, let alone on a regular basis, and that's it. In a sense, buggy and incomplete is the natural state of FOSS projects, preferred even. In a roundabout meaning. That is, consider FOSS itself as a whole, not so much the preferences of interested parties (developers and users). "Preferred", here, more in the sense of, how the system evolves, the minimum-energy state; as physicists would use the word. Thus, large, polished, functional projects are the exception rather than the rule.
Tim