alt Hacker NewsMaking stuff good (fast, performant, non-addictive, etc) are directly opposite the KPIs that most businesses are going to measure.
IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.
That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.
Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".
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I love Home Assistant for all of the reasons you list but I wouldn't say it "just works". It's the kind of thing that requires a lot of research and tinkering to get right. AI does actually help a lot here though, if you tell your agent "setup the new smart lightbulbs I just bought in Home Assistant and add them to my Living Room area", it just does it.
"Commercial" implies to extract the most out of every potential customer. That's a direct logical contradiction to "serving the customer's wishes in every way".
In other words, there can't be any commercial incentives that "align" with providing a perfect user experience.
The weird thing in my opinion: why is open source software such a pain to use? They don't have commercial interests?