Maybe people do care about performance and reliability.

A commonly brought up reason for how much blackboard sucks. People making the purchasing decisions aren’t the people who use it. Nobody gives a crap that it’s slow and regularly loses information and stuff, because the people who do give a crap don’t have the power to do something about it. Same applies to the grocery store checkout software: it’s being decided in corporate HQ somewhere by people who’ll never have to watch it crash during the busiest time of day.