Beautiful software starts simple and focused on the main use case. Labels are short, screens are structured, important buttons stand out. For command line interfaces, the important options are obvious and there are good defaults.
Behind the surface however, beautiful software is capable and configurable. In the settings you will find the extra features you need, and turn them on in a click. They are not upsells of course.
Beautiful software is polished. What doesn't work well is refined until it does. Only once the known bugs are fixed and the performance is good will new features be added.
Features will wait for you to need them and not jump in you face as soon as they've been rushed to production. User happiness is the metric, not feature adoption.
The team behind good software is small, focused on one product and directly involved with users. Each team member understands every major aspect of the products and can do anything in the stack.
Ugly software wins contracts, beautiful software wins hearts. Because it's not as focused on extracting money from users as the competition, is is less profitable, and therefore looses auctions for ad clicks.
Beautiful software doesn't come to you, you have to look for it. I need more beautiful software in my life.
Written in ghostwriter.