You comment inspired this thought: The older I get, the less I have faith in psychological support making us whole. I still think it should be part of work like this but the damage can be as permanent as losing a limb. What is that worth in money? (hypothetical)

I like this take. Payment processors provide a service to both customers and businesses and should get paid, but, the MBA crowd never stops short of anything they COULD get, so they gamify consumers (rewards) and threaten business (nice revenue stream, would be shame if anything happened to it). As a layman l, that’s how I see it. Someone in biz can probably give better detail.

You made a good observation to which I put observations. Probably should have been put somewhere else.

Your project would be a reach for me. Linux as as daily driver is pretty easy if you don’t dial boot and don’t use Apple hardware. I have Ubuntu on an Intel NUC and everything works just fine. Sound, camera, printer, graphics. Haha. You’re going to scare the lazy.

Vendor lock-in. Accessibility to many tools for “non-technical” users. Groupthink. Bundles and anti-interoperability (see vendor lock-in). Fright of open source. Non-technical executives who trust the wrong people. That’s just off the top of my head.

Yes, web developers don't use straight HTML because for anything that is not trivial, it's not sufficient The web today is a place to DO things, not READ things. Even if you are displaying "static" data, Javascript frameworks and libraries can help you write code once and then offload browser compatibility and desktop/mobile presentation formats.

If you add all the interactive elements, it gets even more complex. HTML is powerful and provides transparency, but it's not just the MBA crowd moving away from it.

Also, as desktop applications are quickly being deprecated for browser-based apps, there is more movement to frameworks, and libraries.

Ironically, I started using signal because SMS wasn’t working for a contact that I had in another country. It was that or WhatsApp.