Saying that some piece of software is "bad" (or any synonym of "bad") of course isn't helping anyone. It's demoralizing and counterproductive. I suspect a lot of the bad blood is because so much of the software world is like the faceless behemoths we all love to hate:
- The process of reporting bugs is onerous for most big projects, especially old and/or big ones, which tend to have behemoth issue tracking systems and a bajillion rules (written and unwritten) about what should be in a report, how it should be structured, where it should be reported, and so on. Bonus points for having completely inscrutable fields (domain-specific tags like "T+" or "BZTM" being popular), a manual sign-up approval process, no way to upload files, or not responding to reports for anything older than HEAD even though it's a stable package in major distros.
- The chance of success of a bug report (that is, it's fixed by the time I move to some other alternative) is effectively random. Even heavily funded projects like Firefox leave popular bug reports by the wayside for years, while lots of tiny projects fix even minor issues within days.
- As users become more sophisticated they realize that almost all software is garbage by today's standards. If it's not garbage today it'll be garbage in a year, when it no longer works with any of the surrounding software ecosystem, doesn't implement the latest version of the relevant standards, doesn't use secure crypto primitives, emphasizes [old way of working] over [new way of working], you name it. Software can only stay ahead of the curve by being tiny and actively maintained, or by being really actively maintained.
- The process of reporting bugs is onerous for most big projects, especially old and/or big ones, which tend to have behemoth issue tracking systems and a bajillion rules (written and unwritten) about what should be in a report, how it should be structured, where it should be reported, and so on. Bonus points for having completely inscrutable fields (domain-specific tags like "T+" or "BZTM" being popular), a manual sign-up approval process, no way to upload files, or not responding to reports for anything older than HEAD even though it's a stable package in major distros.
- The chance of success of a bug report (that is, it's fixed by the time I move to some other alternative) is effectively random. Even heavily funded projects like Firefox leave popular bug reports by the wayside for years, while lots of tiny projects fix even minor issues within days.
- As users become more sophisticated they realize that almost all software is garbage by today's standards. If it's not garbage today it'll be garbage in a year, when it no longer works with any of the surrounding software ecosystem, doesn't implement the latest version of the relevant standards, doesn't use secure crypto primitives, emphasizes [old way of working] over [new way of working], you name it. Software can only stay ahead of the curve by being tiny and actively maintained, or by being really actively maintained.