It's not just developer writing a program for one user. It's a very small number of developers writing programs for many many users (unless you make custom software). The impact of what devs do is multiplied by the number of users. That includes the negative impacts of being slow or requiring more resources than necessary.
Imagine Photoshop users having to buy more RAM not just because it is needed by some functionality, but because that functionality used more RAM than was actually necessary. The sheer waste, in money, carbon footprint, and pollution...
Granted, optimising takes time. Time that would be taken to write features. There's a tradeoff there. But we should keep the competition in mind here: there's a difference between a feature being unavailable because you spent time optimizing, and a feature being available elsewhere instead. While it make sense for Photoshop devs to push features as fast as they can, it doesn't to users any good if Krita already offers those features. (I'm ignoring incompatibility here, but you get the idea.)
The incentives are all wrong in my opinion. We should have fast, lean, correct programs to work with. They just don't happen in the current economic system.
It's not just developer writing a program for one user. It's a very small number of developers writing programs for many many users (unless you make custom software). The impact of what devs do is multiplied by the number of users. That includes the negative impacts of being slow or requiring more resources than necessary.
Imagine Photoshop users having to buy more RAM not just because it is needed by some functionality, but because that functionality used more RAM than was actually necessary. The sheer waste, in money, carbon footprint, and pollution...
Granted, optimising takes time. Time that would be taken to write features. There's a tradeoff there. But we should keep the competition in mind here: there's a difference between a feature being unavailable because you spent time optimizing, and a feature being available elsewhere instead. While it make sense for Photoshop devs to push features as fast as they can, it doesn't to users any good if Krita already offers those features. (I'm ignoring incompatibility here, but you get the idea.)
The incentives are all wrong in my opinion. We should have fast, lean, correct programs to work with. They just don't happen in the current economic system.