I think you are a bit too idealistic about the hacking capabilities and willingness of people in general. It is convenient the correct functioning of my car or my phone is the responsibility of someone specific else than me.

Civilization is characterized by specialization of people. I cherish the notion that hardware and software should be based on open standards. For day to day work, I just want my gear to work. If it fails, I certainly do not have the time to dig in to the software layer because I have a work, children, housekeeping duties, and a bunch of art projects and higher level concepts I want to focus on.

"if you have complete visibility into what your machine is doing and have the ability to modify it at will you can avoid all manner of failure scenarios that are essentially unrecoverable in the black box scenario."

You presume all software is trivially simple. I can tell you, it is not. A large category of software requires years of specialization to actually grok what is happening.

As an extreme example if I owned a plane I would not like to hack it's software under any circumstance unless I were a professional aeronautics professional, and probably not even then.