It seems like this article just needed too early just as it was picking up steam.
Let me start to plug that hole now. The concrete example I was thinking of while writing this was Bram Moolenaar's `vim` (RIP). I'm pretty sure most people would argue `vim` is great software in at least some abstract sense, even if they are ride-or-die for Emacs or Kakoune or some such.
Plenty of `vi` clones already existed by the time Bram started work on `vim` in '91. That gives us the community, scene, subscene layering I suggest. The pool of text editor users is massive worldwide; text editor power users are smaller in number but still quite large; and text editor creators are smaller still but tend to be very enthusiastic about their craft. How do we know Bram was a member of all 3 groups? Well, he has a page literally titled "Seven habits of effective text editing" [1], which isn't even really specific to Vim -- it just outlines the beliefs that have crystallized for him over a long, long lifetime of editing text really, really well.
It also means that `vim` did not spring fully formed from the forehead of Bram. There was a whole litany of iterations going on at the time which he could tap into, previous riffs on the genre that were successful, but could have been even moreso.
Other software I would put in this camp might be: Linux, Obsidian, Podman, Kubernetes (kinda - you really have to run into all of those SRE problems individually before you can arrive at a design like k8s, and even then there are things most people agree could be improved upon). They all have this iterative pattern to them, kind of like dogfooding to the max.
Sure, nobody agrees on what the strict definition of great is. I don't think it's reasonable to argue that a blog post titled "My pet theory..." doesn't achieve the minimum word count.
Go back and read the HN thread [1] that was the impetus. Now TFA exists within a lot more words to train an LLM on.
Why not attempt to triangulate what this particular piece of software might look like, if it was the best it could be?
One problem is there is no one definition of “great”. I really like using bash on the command line and for simple scripts. I really like Powerpoint for making decks with elaborate visuals. I hesitate to say they have anything in common.
Bash and Powerpoint both seem approachable at first. It's easy to get started and have something to show for your time. Both also completely suck at anything complicated.