Hopefully this will change with SteamOS

It's telling that when Adobe (pre cc suite) was a perpetual licence for Photoshop and Illustrator, there was not much competition. At least if you had average computing skills in early nineties, working with a limited budget, and wanted graphic manipulation tools your options were buy or 'find' a licence. Changing to subscription licence, Adobe's cornered much of the creative market but this also helped spawn decent alternatives to expensive, bloated suites. The Blender 3D package is another example.

I think what you're saying is, there's going to be a race between development opensource and the corporate market. Thinking how this evolution of market dynamics might apply to the wider software landscape, I think there's no reason why 'non-shiny' software doesn't do its job well enough. They'll always be people who want a 'fashionable' product and be willing to pay for it. For everybody else, myself included, I'm learning to love the culture of learning.

I'm not a dev but if thinking is akin to coding, we stop thinking when we stop coding. Shiny is just a shitcoin.

I hope that with Lightning and Nostr (or maybe in some other way I can't foresee yet) people will be able to pay bounties to developers to improve open source software. Also, this should ensure that developers work on what people actually want. Nowadays, a big deal of the FOSS funding comes from corporations and "foundations", and I believe there is not alignment between what users want and what the funders want.

On the other hand, corporate actors have so much power because they are close to the money faucet. They get to define the mainstream culture and what is considered "cool" by the mainstream. This is not because they are creating awesome products, but because they can spend tons of money in marketing (behavioral economics). I think this is why we are seeing mediocrity not just in software, but in so many areas.

I know it sounds cliché, but bitcoin will fix this in time.