There are lots of products that don't have great design. We're on one now. But there are tons and tons of B2B products shipping from full stack developers every day that don't have great design. But they work, and because they work, they make people happy.
Good aesthetics are nice when you have them, but are absolutely not a requirement for a good piece software so long that it does it's job and the UX doesn't suck. Most real world people don't care how it looks as much as a lot of designers think they do.
Not too imply design isn't important for a real product. But if you're hiring full stack developers, then you're probably not making a ton of comps.
Was HN built today? :) In both cases, you are talking about websites were there's minimal interaction with the website and all you do is read. While that's ok for certain kinds of products, it's not for all of them. So I think we agree that design doesn't make the software, but most devs are used to having weird interfaces and interactions that aren't always clear to normal users. (I'm saying this as a full stack dev myself while looking at the colleagues that I've worked with in the past/present)
It sounds like you're talking about UX. There is quite a bit of intersect, but you can have fantastic UX and still be aesthetically gross. You can't have a weird interface that doesn't make sense and still claim to have a good user experience.
And on the other side, an app can be aesthetically beautiful and total have crap UX, which is too common with a lot of startuppy products.
Being built "today" doesn't have anything to do with it.
Although they have better UI/aesthetics, from a UX perspective, Google and Amazon famously hew pretty closely to their original product design.
What matters to these companies - and, more importantly, their customers - is delivering the content that the customer wants, at the fastest possible speed.
