How to avoid “bad design” with devices?

Can`t really answer your question directly but I can agree with you. I can only argue/discuss from a repair angle. Yep, typical C21st ( and latter part of C20th was not much better either ). Of top notch premium products from my limited experience working on them over a 39 year waste of my time career though on the other hand it was geart fun. I do not have a lot of faith there either. Although hardly top top notch these days I always thought the Bosch /Neff /Siemens washing machine pump design was flawed bearing in mind the type of characters those machines are aimed at: managerial blokes who wear posh shirts with collar stiffners which inevitably are forgotten to be removed and end up half in the filter and half stuck in the pump entrance nozzle making unscrewing the filter impossible due to jamming which is very common and bloody annoying though profitable if you repair the wretched things! The whole design could have been so much better. And you could say that Hotpoint washing machine of a 1995 model 95 series with the inaccessable filter being at the rear of the machine is hardly consumer friendly because it certainly wasn`t and probably done on purpose too. As a now an ex service bod I look at things from a how easy is it to repair design and without wearing rose tinted glasses! And so to conclude. A lot of the 1970/80/to roughly 1995 washing machine products could be a pain in the arse to work on to be frank whereas the dishwashers could be pretty easy ( except Colston cylinder jet spay dishwashers of which most were late 1960`s – dreadful built-in contraptions for the middle to upper classes who could not bare sullying their donnies in water and so we`ll class it as top notch in its day ) whereas you could now say the situation is somewhat reversed and dishwashers are now a pain in the arse ( whilst washing machines are generally easier to fix ) than was the case before but that does not mean they are all cheap to fix, and the quality of the parts are highly suspect which is very true whether expensive or cheap to buy.
As a person who tries to buy nothing if I can at all avoid it, the only way to go is to buy nothing or at least the minimum you think you can get away with, especially these days, so the discussion has shifted to: do you buy cheap, simple stuff that is easy to fix if you have that repair mental bent or if it fails scrap the thing or do you buy expensive which will not be easy to fix or at least it will have very expensive parts in order to repair but even then that is not cast in stone: Indesit washing machines are cheap and simple BUT despite the 10 year free parts warranty you cannot buy a new pcboard without having it lap top programmed by an Indesit engineer or, in truth, a DIY is possible BUT you have to buy a programmer plug in device ( about 180 quid ) and a programmer card ( £22 ) plus the new pcb at £110 which means it`ll cost you more than the machine cost in the first place but then if you called out Indesit it for that fault it will work out part free labour about 115 quid or so – still annoying just less annoyingly expensive! This of course brings in Green Issues which every man and his dog, especially this trade plays on but it is all done in a cloak and dagger way and an example of that is: you buy your 750 quid machine ( more or less a top notch product least the brand is classed as such ) and it fails some way some how out of warranty and your total bill is £400 ( not unknown ) on a five year old machine…..so what are going to do because you are now trapped, or at least caught by the short ones: too expensive to repair ( and given the premature failure you ask yourself what`s going to be the next disaster? ) too young and expensive to wright it off and there is the dilemma – not a good position to find yourself in bathing burnt fingers in ice cold bucket of water!. Alternatively you bought cheap with no expectations having bought a Curry`s Logik made in China ( the slightly better ones are the ones made in Turkey but it depends upon which failure point ): it does the job, the speed wash button is a godsend otherwise the programme times will have you waiting until your pension date arrives providing the pension goal posts have not shifted but the bearing oil seal was not greased on assembly and so it suffered premature bearing failure. Unlike the £750 posh machine which has a sealed tank unit this Logik costing 200 quid has a tank you can take to bits and replace the bearings and a new oil seal for peanuts ( less than 20 quid so long as it was caught early on ) and you can do it yourself BUT say that your a typical nail bar visiting modern female with no tools no sense and no experience of ….well anything of any consquence except of course bitching and moaning about the easy life is lead on your wots app smart phone… you are now stuck and that machine is going to cost you over 100 quid to get repaired by “The shark**fish Repair Company” you are in a similar position although in way a slightly better position: so the question is would you rather have to scrap from 200 quid or 750 quid? The other conclusion is nothing is really a ” Green ” product at all whether any washing machine, dishwasher, petrol car, or electric car but a 50cc moped might be at 120 miles to the gallon it is just your life expectancy is probably not that long! ** no offense to sharks intended!