UX is hugely undervalued, I wonder if one of the reasons is because you don’t notice good UX, it’s not in the way, but you noticed bad UX. So good UX without a lot of marketing is invisible.
I absolutely agree. It's especially underestimated how hard it is to make actually good UX because what feels intuitive can be highly individual. In addition the typical techie nerd that does the programming is more interested in technical puzzles than trying to view the program with the eyes of an end user (which feels pretty schizophrenic at times since you know how the thing works but need to dissociate from that knowledge).