But it's possible to have usability and a unique design character, if you use a human designer.

True, but why would people use yet another lookalike tool over the one they're currently using? Or is the implication that looks don't matter as long as it works? Because if that's the case, Why do we need CSS?

the "solving users' problems" framing works for most products but gets complicated for developer tools, where the design is the interaction model. a CLI that gives you typed errors and predictable verbs is design. a confusing API surface that makes you guess is also design, just bad design. the pride question becomes: did you respect the user's mental model?

Much of the sadness of the current tech industry comes about because the user's problems were solved in the 90s but now we need to make up new ones to justify the fat salaries, headcount increases, and stock price.

> They're paying for insight, leverage, velocity, convenience, whatever.

Correct, they are paying for work done by people in other roles, who's title isn't UI or UX designer. It's on the backend person for velocity, it's for business development for leverage, it's on data scientists for insight, it's on logistics for convenience. Those people will be paid for solving those problems, not for tweaking CSS. My team, who falls into this category of more invisible work, has not hired UI or UX person at all. Which by mathematically speaking by default, is simply below the average rate for that work. Meanwhile Apple will pay easily mid six figures for someone in a more flashy role.

To prove the above person’s point, sap and salesforce have some of the most notoriously bad ux in the market and yes they make bank.

Design is much harder for power user tools compared to consumer. There is far more complexity and the expectation often is users must be trained to even use the tool.

Design only goes so far.

I think there's something nice about the idea of a store owner which has unnecessarily decorated the store with love, even with the liability of a cat; it's not delivering the product better and the cat may actually make things worse because of allergies.

A cold American convenience store may be delivering the fundamental value at American prices, but there's something to be said about that "extra" human or creative element. One might say the same thing about the changing nature of the web over time, less individual CSS chaos and more Facebook aesthetics.