> they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products
I worked with IBMers. The main priority for a lot of them is to ensure continuous employment for themselves and their buddies. They'd add unnecessary complexity to a product to stretch out the development for another couple of years. And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks. They can't compete.
Right? Spreadsheets have such a low barrier of entry. I use Google Sheets in a middle of a farm field to enter plant growing records on my cell phone. I don't even have good reception at times so the sheets are in offline mode; they'll synch when I get back to the house.
Crappy, crummy records are oftentimes better than no records. Farming is data-heavy and data-starved at the same. A learning cycle is a year, and one year is not like the other one.
> will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals
You can look no further than masking for Covid prevention. It makes sense, it works, it's relatively easy but social pressure is strong enough to force the majority to make a suicidal decision not to.
We are so, so screwed.
> old lifeless dork professor at "elite" university mumbling some nonsense and throwing walls of formulas with zero context
"Oh, you have a PhD in Chemistry? I hated orgo in college..." I heard it often enough to suspect some kind of a collusion. But no, there is no collusion, just old crummy dudes gatekeeping knowledge to preserve their status, and the departments allowing them to do so.
Last year Hostgator suddenly changed the conditions of my plan without any warning at a renewal time so I "conveniently" went over the storage quota, then shut me down. I had to pay the extortion fee to restore service. Needless to say, I'll be moving before the next renewal.