That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them.
I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down.
I would very much like to write a programming language, a blogging tool, a web framework, a game, a game development tool, etc etc etc. But I never will. Most of the people reading this never will either.
So I endure. I meditate, I practice stoicism, I go to the gym. But I had to let my dreams die for my own self-preservation because opportunity cost grew to consume my entire psyche. I simply can't think about all of the other things I could be doing while I have to work. And all I do is work.
There doesn't seem to be much help coming in terms of UBI or having N people split a 40 hour workweek or forming artist communes for makers. Sure, we hear the occasional stories. But it's like we're all waiting around for a billionaire to liberate us, rather than creating a scalable cooperative system to sustain all of us right now today.
What I'm saying is that until we look beyond the technical challenges and see that the problem is subjugation, we'll never get free of the lackluster tools, because we'll never have time to make better ones.