I'm talking about an automatic, bean-to-cup machine here, which has it's own built-in grinder. Specifically the ECAM 350.35.W, but there are many Delonghi models which have very similar hardware inside.
It gives precise control over the grind fineness, but tries to manage the grind time (and thus volume of coffee in the puck) itself. The software that does this isn't very smart and that's where the problems lie...
That's not what they said though, they were asking about improving the output quality.
If I could control grind time precicely, it would hugely improve the consistency my coffee. I could set up a profile for each type of bean that I use and fine-tune my shots.
Bean to cup espresso machines are good for what they are, but not a good base for making great coffee, and software hacking can't fix the hardware limitations.
To be clear, my bean to cup machine does make great coffee! Could I make even better coffee with a fancy manual espresso machine and investing a lot of my time in learning and using and cleaning it? Sure, probably. But it's not really worth my time. I'd spend half my morning making coffee when all I really want is to be drinking coffee.
Anecdote: at my previous London flat, I had my bean-to-cup machine and one of my flatmates had a fancy manual machine. He knew how to use it, too, having once worked as a barista. But which machine do you think everyone actually used every morning? The manual one ended up getting put away in a cupboard most of the time! (... and my former flatmate still jokes about how much he misses my coffee machine when I see him, haha)
This isn't to say that a manual machine doesn't make better coffee than a bean to cup, in the right hands. But for most people, the difference isn't worth the time and effort required to get there.
> "software hacking can't fix the hardware limitations"
In this case, I believe it would, because the machine does make great coffee when it gets everything right. Specifically the grind time / volume of grinds in the shot. The issue is the consistency, and the software's poor behaviour in wildly changing the grind time when something throws it out of equilibrium (ie: change to different beans, or hopper runs out of beans)
It gives precise control over the grind fineness, but tries to manage the grind time (and thus volume of coffee in the puck) itself. The software that does this isn't very smart and that's where the problems lie...