I don’t agree with your premise that the performance and functionality is so far below every competitor. That is not my experience. What are you basing your claim on?
They are well made machines with high quality components and are in most cases perfectly capable of going as fast as the plastic allows. And if they don’t, a few minor upgrades to the hardware will get them flying as they’re typically mostly going to be hotend-limited. Are you competing the actual realistic maximum acceptable performance of comparable machines that have been independently tested by an experienced reviewer, or are you comparing numbers someone copied from marketing? Because these are not the same thing and only one of them actually reflects reality.
As far as functionality, the only feature I see wanting in Prusa’s lineup is IDEX, which I prefer over toolswitchers for making large numbers of small parts. I keep hoping their next model will be a spiffy little IDEX model, but no luck so far.
That push and pull is exactly why they’ve been intentionally using them to rot people’s brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental “quirk” of modern algorithms, it’s part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They’re not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.