[fstanis]

IIRC "The Design of Everyday Things" makes a point that most devices have poorly explained errors (beeps, error codes etc) because nobody chooses what to buy based on how it acts when it's failing, so there's no incentive to spend money on it. For hardware, the cost is quite literal, as having a better display just to show error messages is a lot more expensive than a beeper.

With software, it's probably a matter of prioritization, why invest into explaining errors when you can work on preventing them? Not that this error prevention always works out, but still.