The reason people in power don't care about design is because good design is hard to quantify and thus hard to justify effort and/or expense.

The results of bad design (i.e. takeoff power from grandparent) are much easier to quantify and therefore easier to use to catalyze improvement.

This is why Apple, under Jobs, was so unique. He helped rebuild the company around design despite the fact that their obsession with design cost them loads of money (in the short term). In the longer term, their products' success has spoken for itself but you can bet that past shareholders/board members were constantly asking "do we need this?"

> you can bet that past shareholders/board members were constantly asking "do we need this?"

I wouldn't take that bet.

Jobs simply had a better sense of user interface design than others, and was in a position to get his way. It's not that others didn't care about it.

It is about feedback-loops. Even well-funded, top-down design is going to have cognitive gaps. Also it needs to be continuous, usage changes, users/people/customer change, features are added. Other tools in outside environment are adopted, etc ... All these need to be continuously evaluated. tested, and reconsidered. Plenty of people in power acknowledge UX to be important enough to "approve a headcount" but it probably is too limited, narrowly focused, and only focused on new stuff.

It's not because they don't care. They are just inherently bad at it. Look at all the bad designs in programming languages. The designers certainly did care.

It's more about unknown unknowns.

Before we get to those as an explanation, we need to see less evidence of shit design you can spot instantly without having any experience in the field. If a user can instantly recommend an improvement to the design that most would agree is an improvement, that's evidence of shit design.

All parties can agree on a design, and then its flaws become obvious only after it is in use for a while.