Comment by wasfgwp

You are assuming the interest of people making those designs were aligned with the interests of consumers. They obviously were only to a very small degree since there were almost no incentives for Soviet companies to produce anything that wasn’t complete crap. Consumers had no choice since even the crap products they produced were hardly ever available to normal people anyway.

> USSR just wasn't rich enough

To an extent by choice. They really didn’t utilize the resources they had optimally.