Crony capitalism wins yet again.
The US needs serious reform on what it allows corporate entities to do. Your common citizen couldn't get away with a fraction of the arguable theft to the general population most these companies get away with. It's not technically "theft" though since the theives define the rules and what constitutes theft to not include their actions.
Alas, I don't know how we accomplish such reform. It increasingly seems to be yet another lost battle and perhaps lost war. Aside from consumers essentially checking out as many segments of systems and allowing them to crumble under their own weight and then rebuild them after under stricter policy, I'm not sure what can be done. Legisilation doesn't seem to reflect the needs of the many and continues to cater to the wants of a few.
I suspect Intuit and the like argue that any sort of electronic system of improvement is some direct competition to the private market and is unethical. They probably also argue that the free market version of something like TurboTax offers a more cost effective solution to the general tax payer than what it would cost the government to simply fix parts of a broken process to simplify things. In the short term these arguments could be viable but I'm pretty sure within a few years time, a tax system that didn't involve so many people spending hours of their time navigating through these commercial packages while also paying them plus many still needing an accountant to speak to could possibly be cheaper than a simplified tax system.
Obviously simplifying the tax system can have socioeconomic effects. Many deductions exist to try and fix those issues or help push policy onto citizens and some of the complexity is unavoidable as even those dedications are loopholes around existing legislation. It seems to me though we can still allow for these sort of dedications to let people who need tax relief get it and not what we currently have where the people getting tax relief are the ones with mountains of capital to hire professionals to find and exploit tax loopholes while so many who need the tax relief likely overpay comparatively as a relative portion of their total assets.