[daemonologist]

I love my bicycle for this reason - I can do 100% of the maintenance and repairs myself (short of welding a cracked frame, but I could take everything off and swap it to a new frame). Almost all parts are standardized and available from third parties, even in case the original manufacturer goes under. And of course the whole thing cost less than that headlight assembly.

Anyways, I think the reason software follows this path is cost - rather than pay an engineer for optimization you have them work on new fancy features, and just expect the user to buy a faster machine. As computers get faster/cheaper this applies more and more.