[xipho]

I'm admit I'm not totally clear as to your point. If it is that software is terrible because it's not accountable to its users then yes, I agree, this is often one of the reasons why.

In our case our group is funded primarily by an endowement. We use (dogfood) our own software, therefor we are accountable to ourselves. We are also developing it for our friends, collaborators, and other scientists who have traditionally not had access to the types of tools we work on, we are accountable to them. The bits that exist are because our users need them, have co-designed them, and have given us a ton of feedback as to how to iteratively improve them. We don't have to sell ($) them a product (yes, we understand there are long term issues with growth, support, and sustainability that will take hard work to deal with).

We're fortunate enough to have time to think and engage with concepts that startups that must have to sell products must master, thus we can "dream" about what game interfaces might bring to the table.