The problem is that all of the qualia that can only bee seen and articulated by a professional practitioner aren't necessarily stacked in a heap. It's more of a Jenga tower of mutually reinforcing practices. Maybe some of the blocks lost to cost cutting weren't load bearing, but as each one comes out the structure gets more fragile.
There's the lure towards disruption and cutting the right thing to win big. Everyone already knows that strategy though, and the market is full of different stratifications of disruption - streamers disrupt the networks, creator economy sites disrupt the streamers, short form socials disrupt the creators. Any new thing needs a real reason to exist in that ecosystem beyond just being worse.
I'm talking from a perspective of someone working with QA in my day job. And I do have to answer questions about the quality. Like, "did the quality of the product increase in the last release?" or "is our quality higher than the competition?" or "will this drop in quality be acceptable for the majority of our customers?"
And, really, every time I'm called to answer questions like these, I know full well that no matter how much time I spend analyzing the test results, coverage, test strategies, dissecting JIRA etc. my answers will be based on little more than a guess (and no, it's not the subconsciousness, it just means that I'll be probably wrong!)
I wish I could just "let it go" and observe the gestalt of the product and say lgtm! (or not). Just because my subconsciousness told me it's so. :)
No, it's not like Jenga. It doesn't reinforce each other. There's always a possibility to drill down to details, which makes the discussion and comparison easy (or easier), but the more complex the thing I'm trying to assess the quality of, the worse it gets.
Is ZFS better than Ext4?
Is MariaDB good enough, or should we switch to a more "high quality" PostgreSQL? How about Oracle?
Is Python 3.13 objectively better than Python 3.10?
What about Ethernet vs IB?
Answering any of these questions would get experts twisted in a knot of endless arguments precisely because quality is very hard to assess. It has too many faces, too many metrics...
There's the lure towards disruption and cutting the right thing to win big. Everyone already knows that strategy though, and the market is full of different stratifications of disruption - streamers disrupt the networks, creator economy sites disrupt the streamers, short form socials disrupt the creators. Any new thing needs a real reason to exist in that ecosystem beyond just being worse.