I fully agree with your first point. However, I don't think Quickbooks purposefully designed their software to be hard to use. I think that just happened when they grew their software organically without spending much effort and rework with good UX designers.
It's more important that B2B "work" software works accurately, correctly and ticks all the required features, than that it is intuitive or beautiful. A steep learning curve is a problem for B2C software, not so much for B2B software that is used intensely.
They may not have purposefully designed it originally, but they purposefully keep it hard to use now.
Internally, they have Quickbooks training courses that new employees and employees who work on other products can take. When I took the course, I asked why deleting a transaction was a completely different UI interaction from deleting a contact in QBO. Both pages were, at their core, list widgets so both should share UI, right? But, I was told, they'd done UX tests with experienced users who had strong reactions to making UI interactions like that consistent.
The problem isn't lack of good UX designers. When I was there, they hired Frog design to completely rethink many of the UI interactions. This was in addition to many talented UI/UX people that work on the product full time. It's a product that brings in billions of dollars a year...the resources are there to fix it. But the problem is an existing product and a user base that's resistant to change and one that views their proficiency in the product as an achievement that they'd like competing bookkeepers to also have to attain.
This is strongly embedded in the accounting culture (CPA, in particular tax preparation business): I want every man, woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos. I want everyone to remember why they need us!
> But, I was told, they'd done UX tests with experienced users who had strong reactions to making UI interactions like that consistent.
Had they strong reactions to those being consistent (and thus easier to learn), or did they have strong reactions to those being different from what they were used to?
It's more important that B2B "work" software works accurately, correctly and ticks all the required features, than that it is intuitive or beautiful. A steep learning curve is a problem for B2C software, not so much for B2B software that is used intensely.