[axguscbklp]

>"We put up with slow, bloated, and inadequate software because blah blah blah" - no, we put up with it because the market doesn't care about it.

Yep. Company culture / psychology is also a factor. You can hire a bunch of amazing programmers who deeply care about speed and elegance but unless business pressures exist to incentivize those things and also the company's process and management are set up to encourage those things, it will not matter. A developer can care about speed and elegance, but if his bosses want him to use bloated frameworks because "everybody uses them" and it is easy to find developers for them, or if the feature requirements keep shifting, or if his bosses want him to spend time writing some pointless tests because of supposed "best practices", or if any of a bunch of other factors are at play, it will not matter much.

So I am not sure that a shortage of developers who are competent at those things is the real bottleneck.