"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."

Strip away observations like "nobody has ever quite been able to agree on all the details of how the desktop UI should work" which more or less ignores the consensus you get within projects like GNOME and KDE that even developed frameworks for making consistent applications - I'd argue the latter was more successful than the former at this - and "for Aunt Marge it is very much not OK to have to use a different UI to cut and paste in one program than she uses in another" which was largely an old, solved problem already back in 2003, there's no real insight other than to believe mythological tales about a culture that arguably doesn't apply by someone who probably thinks hammers are the tool for every job.

The fact is that you have to develop something, believe in it, and then mercilessly refine and iterate until people stop complaining about it. That's what's missing, and it has nothing to do people liking text files for their settings and trivial distractions of that nature.