You raise an interesting point about what our place as software developers is. We continue to deliver solutions that allow people to have their money, identities, etc, stolen. It’s not all of us, all the time, but our culture is not about building the most bulletproof of solutions (to put it nicely; some of us build things that actively bad for society). Other engineering cultures are much stricter with their quality control, and restrictions on use are part of that.

Is requiring certified electrical wiring that much different from a “walled garden”? Some people tinker at the edges of their home setup, but you’d probably be pretty worried if you found out your average neighbor had rewired their whole house on their own following some lifehack they found online. Computers are connected in a different way than neighboring houses, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by the decisions of your digitally-close acquaintances (from worms and botnets down to simple email/contact harvesting).

That’s not to say the world hasn’t benefitted greatly from software choosing velocity over robustness; other technologies have followed similar early arcs, causing damage before they matured. Maybe we’re at the point where limiting choice is simply one of our least-bad strategies for most people? For what it’s worth, I am pretty confident that the vast majority of people want computing appliances and not tools (why would computers be any different from any other consumer good?), so I find it highly unlikely that the pro-tinkering arguments apply outside of a tiny proportion of users. I definitely don’t mean to imply that this is the only way, but it seems like there’s already a spectrum of choices for consumers and sometimes it feels like we’re arguing to narrow the less “open” end of that spectrum because we’re projecting ourselves onto the whole population.