They are incompetent, but it's not (totally) their fault.

They were never exposed to the powerful and highly configurable classic Unix window managers and desktops, only Windows, Mac, and iOS. Yes, these old desktops all had their warts and configuration was not always a straightforward affair but they packed a lot of functionally into a small package.

It's like asking an otherwise experienced programmer to write an IDE when all they ever used was notepad.exe and a command-line compiler.