I think my point is people should just be quiet about things they know nothing about. 10% of tech is consumer tech and the other 90% of tech is the things that run daily life that people know nothing about. Think machine to machine communications, scheduling systems, fraud detection, facial recognition, infrastructure, manufacturing, etc… you can have a whole career in tech and never have to think about consumer markets. One of my first jobs in tech was writing programs to cut parts out of expensive materials so efficiently that waste was minimized as much as possible, saving so much money, getting fat bonuses.
If you hear the word tech and just think of websites, apps, social networks, ads, you have a very simple world view.
So yea, consumer tech sucks, but consumers also fucking suck, and get harder and harder to extract some kind of value from as time goes on.
Ah, well it was news to some people that tech entrepreneurs aren't exactly beloved and I was explaining why I think that is. I know something about that, anyway. Also not totally clueless about a steady march of technological progress that most people don't notice the benefits of. Since people don't notice it, it's not relevant to why people don't love tech entrepreneurs, hence the question. It's about perception.
The "consumers suck" attitude probably goes a long way towards explaining the problem.