Windows 3.1, for example. It had a very elegant Virtual Machine Manager with pre-emptive multitasking and true process isolation... and then GUI programs were all placed into a single cooperatively-multitasked event loop, because anything else would have killed performance. And the OS also had to continue to support IO device drivers written for DOS—that could disable interrupts system-wide and thus freeze the computer!—because otherwise your (horrible, un-QAed) scanner wouldn't work.

I fully believe that software hasn't gotten much better over the last 40 years. The hardware constraints have simply relaxed to the point that we're no longer forced to make as many Faustian bargains.

Some years ago I was working for an educational software company. We sold directly to schools. As expected, we'd get a lot of feedback from teachers using the product. For a while, everyone from the execs on down would ignore this feedback with a laugh. The majority of teachers we dealt with were absolutely clueless about anything involving software. Their reports reflected this ineptness.

One day, I had an epiphany that maybe, just maybe, these people were worth listening to. We went over the written feedback, translated their ramblings into something approximating proper bug reports, and it turned out they were doing a wonderful job of pointing out many of the problems (especially UI) hiding in our blind spots.

We had dismissed them because of a perceived cluelessness, and probably because of some internalized ageism & sexism (most of these teachers were middle aged+ women and most of my team was not). And yet when we finally listened to them, we put out an update which led to several accolades, a sudden drop-off in complaints, and probably our best selling product.