> I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project.

Well, it's a bit of back and forth between business and engineering.

> So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.

Generally yes, but sometimes it's hard because of double-sided network effects. The classic example being expensive but prestigious scientific journals:

All the scientists and funding agencies would benefit from moving to cheaper journals, but an individual scientist will try to publish their best work in the most prestigious journal they can get.

(And often the complainers mix in some good old paternalism, too: 'oh, those customers are ill-informed and the companies are exploiting them by tricking them into buying inferior products and getting trapped.' or some story like that.)

> I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.

The money was necessary, but not sufficient. Compare the great performance of the Voyagers with the disaster that was the Space Shuttle program or the ongoing farce that is the International Space Station.

The profit argument is not great for everything humans need, not everything can be driven by profit motives, look where that’s gotten us in medical care in America, social insurance, etc. Profit driven enterprise is efficient, but needs balance that doesn’t seem to be there today in order to limit the extremes.

I agree. Voyager happened because of what you say. But then we cannot compare apples to orangutans by pointing out how Voyager rocked but all these for-profit endeavours sucked.