I don't think that's a purely contingent association, either: with software, how the UI looks and how the functionality works are deeply intertwined, and I think there may be a more direct correlation between "modern" software being unreliable, unconfigurable, and insecure, and it having haphazard UI designs that lack underlying organizing principles or adherence to well-established conventions.
So your original complaint seems to imply almost the opposite of what you are saying here -- that superficial aesthetics are more important to you, even to the point where you'd accept poor functionality and user-hostile anti-patterns as a viable tradeoff.