This was originally in response to your parent, but gonna attach it to your comment instead, cause you're right.
I don't believe we've found the low-hanging fruit at all, it's still all over the place.
There are hundreds of pieces of software and hardware that are expensive, or unintuitive, or user-hostile, many are all of the above. HN complains every day about bad software. Is this really the best we've got?
There's just no way. What it does take is people willing to take a step off the usual treadmill and getting their talent and ability sucked into large companies and willing to take a risk to build their own stuff. That ability is there, the will is not. Some people have 30,000 HN comments. You're telling me 10k of those detailed thoughtful comments aren't absorbing time that can be put into building better stuff?
Hardware is thousands of times more powerful and cheaper than it was 20 years ago. Software is likewise more capable, or at the very least, libraries are way more abundant.. Say what you want about new languages, but I'll take the option of Rust, Nim, Go, Clojure, etc, than what existed 15 years ago any day. Not that that stuff was bad, but today you have the option, and it's fucking cheap to build.
Why aren't we building? Why do we act like we need millions of dollars in funding to do stuff you can do in your underwear? Do we really believe all the good ideas are gone or have been executed well? That seems crazy to me. I just think we're lacking imagination and we've adopted a woe is me attitude (I know I struggle with this all the time).
That's just software, where greenfield stuff is cheaper than anything in the world, where implementing your thoughts is a matter of sitting down. If you've worked in any business, you know of the inefficiencies within, and if you've worked in a big one, you really know about them.
There is so much low hanging fruit! Just about any product you can pick up in your house, any regular process you go through, there's a major opportunity to look at that and think about how that can be done better and cheaper and more reliably. What's more, that's about the easiest thing to do, because it's just working off what already exists.
Sorry if I'm not more specific, but there's gonna be people looing back in ten or twenty or two years and wondering how so many people missed x or y or z, which in retrospect is so obvious.