It seems to me, at least as someone on the outside of this debate looking in, that people are having some trouble defining what "better" actually means. I think if the difference could be quantified, it could be addressed.
Ken Kocienda talks about this in his book Creative Selection. While working at Apple, they identified processes that needed to optimized with heuristics as opposed to algorithms. Some things need to be tweaked by a person and cannot be solved by applying an algorithm. He posits that this is the reason Apple has traditionally had such a great user experience with the products.
