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)
