Comment by tgv

I see where you're coming from, but my experience says (TLDR): lack of dogfooding.

In my current job, I'm building a system which has replaced the "SaaS" we used before. Not only was it fairly expensive, and sluggish, it was also not good, and in some parts even bad. And that fits a pattern I've seen before: that SaaS product, a survey platform, was built by a company that builds software, but doesn't use it. Engineers nor management are involved in making actual surveys and processing the results at any scale. The result is a system that requires bizarre hacks to make the system do what you need it to do. OTOH, I work right next to the people that use my software, and some of which have a lot of experience. We're small, independent, there's not much management involved, and everyone is aligned, and we all talk to each other.

Not knowing what your customers actually need is one of the big faults of software engineering, and in large companies, architects, engineers, and management can be quite far removed from their customers' experience.