Lingua Franca predates colonialism. Latin predates Lingua Franca, although one can argue Latin was forced down due to the Roman Empire's extensive reach and size. Ancient Greek also served a similar role. One doesn't need to learn each others language as long as they all know one common language. One could argue for Esperanto, or a purely symbolic language like traffic icons, but you need to learn that one too. So it makes more sense to use a fit for purpose language for travel that has no ambiguities. You can even create a graph that can be queried. There's all sorts of ways to solve this with as little pain as possible as long as you care to. And wanting people to just learn the local language to traverse a transport network is chauvinism.
Windows users are not customers. Businesses are. Tech conglomerates and everyone adjacent are going for the big money, it's what everyone is doing , it really is a fantastic world devoid of anything but ROI numbers. The fastest way to get rich or die trying, gangstas got nothing on these cats.
"How money works" YouTube channel had a nice video about this trend in particular going back to making stock buybacks legal in 1982 I think, which made CEO and execs wealth acquisition driven not by a long successful career with healthy margins and dividends, but a short-tenured local maximum pump-and-dump and a hold-the-bag game funded by endless fiat currency which is printed on the backs of other people. Other people's money , Gordon Gecko, they're not just real, they're celebrity sociopaths running us into the ground because of a fragile ego.
This isn't Star Trek and we will never have Star Trek, whatever your exact fantasy is this ends badly. If we had an iota of foresight and agency left , we would be setting up guillotines, not signing up for another round of work/pay/die. All we would need to do is teach nothing but history, philosophy, and math: we would know what we tried before, why and what we should strive for, and how to achieve it. But let's just buy some Vanguard or NVDA or whatever makes the number go up.
Was McNamara really thinking that's how you win a war and people just went along with it or was it just another excuse in a long line of excuses to keep the gravy train going?
If it had been solved before we would not be in the predicament we are now, i.e. people might be able to learn but that doesn't mean everyone does. In fact, most do not because we are too busy figuring out how to die leading less fulfilling, more angst-ridden lives.
The NASA example should highlight the normalisation of deviance. The Challenger o-rings had failed before and while engineers were very vocal about that, management overruled them. The foam impacts and tile loss were also a known factor in the Columbia disaster but the abort window is very small. Both point to perverse incentives: maintaining the gravy train. One comment made the point earlier that if Cloudflare were more thorough they would not have captured the market because they would be slower. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast but YMMV. At the end of the day everything can be tracked down to a system that incentivizes wealth accumulation over capability with the fixation that capability can be bought which is a lie.
The Meatfucker acts as a vigilante and is unpopular because of the privacy invasions. The Zetetic Elench splintered off. The Culture's morals were tested in the Idiran war. They might not have greed as a driver because it's unnecessary but they do have freedom of choice so they're not exactly saints.
Both films you mention are from Dennis Villeneuve, it's probably just his stylistic look and cinematography in general that you don't like. There are much better examples of bad cinema to contrast against Blade Runner, plus there's not a lot of neonoir.