Even with an entire top-down team dedicated to serving the user and not corporate interests (which would be all but impossible, except in the world of open source), you'll always have a few stray users asking for features that not everybody wants, and there will be perpetual arguments about which features would benefit most users.
At the end of the day, the problem isn't that software is user-hostile, or written for engineers or corporate surveillance, but that nobody will ever agree 100% on what features should go into any piece of software.
Even with an entire top-down team dedicated to serving the user and not corporate interests (which would be all but impossible, except in the world of open source), you'll always have a few stray users asking for features that not everybody wants, and there will be perpetual arguments about which features would benefit most users.
At the end of the day, the problem isn't that software is user-hostile, or written for engineers or corporate surveillance, but that nobody will ever agree 100% on what features should go into any piece of software.