Most people can't perceive "micro stutters" and many who can don't care. It's a fairly niche feature requirement.
You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.
What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.
Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.
Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.
> the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough
Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.
> average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care
When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.
If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.
The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.
Clearly at least $100 (not adjusted for inflation) based on trends from 1990-2015.
Peoples primary reason for upgrading computer was better performance for years, after all.