I think a perfect example of Open Source thriving is IBM. They package open source software (Eclipse for RAD, Apache for IBM Apache), and sell support.
It's not a clusterfuck, you just have business people who need to have support 24/7 from people with full time intimate knowledge of the product.
If you accept the premise from the post that minimizing support costs acts as an incentive to enhance usability, then i think there's an important factor you're touching on here. Since many open source organizations provide FOSS software and charge for support, they've got less of an incentive to provide easy to use software. Rather, their model is tuned to providing easy to support software.
It's not a clusterfuck, you just have business people who need to have support 24/7 from people with full time intimate knowledge of the product.