Quick answer: is our software any more usable, any more reliable, than it was 50 years ago? The more code you write, the more dependencies you require, the more opportunity for bugs and design errors to creep in. I get the impression that many software projects have enough fixes and kludges slathered on them to make them work nowadays.
(Remember Bill Atkinson's famous response, quoted here to how much code he'd written that week: -3000. He had reworked Quickdraw so that it was faster and better, with a net loss of 3000 lines of code.) Of course the classic Mac had its own constraints.
