People get offended because they like to think of themselves as moral, protestant beings divinely motivated to strive for perfection in their work. It isn't that some people don't care, it's just that unmotivated "caring" is arbitrarily distributed. This shop may be filled with passionate people trying to channel the Universe's principle, and the shop next door may be filled with people who actively hate what they do, and who they do it for, even though they're not going anywhere. This decade your industry may be full of passionate people, and the next decade you can't find a single person who cares. That sort of stuff is wildly dependent on propaganda and people making myths about themselves and what they do. And on how much everybody is making.
What's important are people's lifestyles, what they really want to enjoy, and how that will be impeded or aided by the product. The product is not a goal in itself except to fetishists (and they're enjoying their fetish.) People want to be happy. The system surrounding them determines their relationship to the product, because it determines how the product can improve their odds/ability to enjoy themselves, at least over a different product, or a different process.
This is the countervailing force to "premature optimization is the root of all evil." Most people have no reason to care very much about polishing what they're doing, because they're doing it for is to draw a salary, not to create a perfect thing. If you're not going to need it for long, if it's likely to fail, if it has no competition and people will have to use it even if it's bad, if it's the third in a very successful, hyped series and looks enough like the last two but came in a lot cheaper, if you personally already have your next four jobs lined up, if your manager just needs to deliver quickly and will be able to hand maintenance off to someone else, if what you're replacing is garbage, if the thing is already sold.
Most people aren't literally interested (as in owning an interest, not some speculation about people's internal states) in caring at all, because something is an improvement over nothing. The people who care are the people who have to pay to maintain something, sometimes, and only when it costs them money. If they're just writing the checks on behalf of someone else, they may even be perversely motivated to want bigger checks, because when that check gets small, the job of the person who writes it is getting endangered.
All the way down the the shifting mass (the people who have no standards in music are a different though maybe overlapping set than the people who have no standards in cars) of the majority consumer with very few standards, often enforced by a market that has connived to offer them very few options. Even worse, all marketing is designed to attach an image to the actual product: it is often having to try and convince you that something that is mediocre, and that you've already experienced, is luxury. If you've invested in mediocre luxury, you have to pretend that it was worth it, at least not to feel dumb like you've made a bad investment, or to grab some worth out of the thing as a Veblen good.
What's important are people's lifestyles, what they really want to enjoy, and how that will be impeded or aided by the product. The product is not a goal in itself except to fetishists (and they're enjoying their fetish.) People want to be happy. The system surrounding them determines their relationship to the product, because it determines how the product can improve their odds/ability to enjoy themselves, at least over a different product, or a different process.
This is the countervailing force to "premature optimization is the root of all evil." Most people have no reason to care very much about polishing what they're doing, because they're doing it for is to draw a salary, not to create a perfect thing. If you're not going to need it for long, if it's likely to fail, if it has no competition and people will have to use it even if it's bad, if it's the third in a very successful, hyped series and looks enough like the last two but came in a lot cheaper, if you personally already have your next four jobs lined up, if your manager just needs to deliver quickly and will be able to hand maintenance off to someone else, if what you're replacing is garbage, if the thing is already sold.
Most people aren't literally interested (as in owning an interest, not some speculation about people's internal states) in caring at all, because something is an improvement over nothing. The people who care are the people who have to pay to maintain something, sometimes, and only when it costs them money. If they're just writing the checks on behalf of someone else, they may even be perversely motivated to want bigger checks, because when that check gets small, the job of the person who writes it is getting endangered.
All the way down the the shifting mass (the people who have no standards in music are a different though maybe overlapping set than the people who have no standards in cars) of the majority consumer with very few standards, often enforced by a market that has connived to offer them very few options. Even worse, all marketing is designed to attach an image to the actual product: it is often having to try and convince you that something that is mediocre, and that you've already experienced, is luxury. If you've invested in mediocre luxury, you have to pretend that it was worth it, at least not to feel dumb like you've made a bad investment, or to grab some worth out of the thing as a Veblen good.
Why I said it's the countervailing force to the premature optimization cliché is not an original thought, but if you don't prematurely optimize, you're probably never going to get a chance to optimize, because too many people will find it useful enough half-broken. So if you're the one that's going to be stuck with it, or take the (financial) blame for problems with it, push back and prematurely optimize as much as you have time to do (but watch that time, if it's software I always double my guess of how long something's going to take.)
Otherwise, you should really also not be caring about quality. It's a means, not an end.