The web experience is optimised for the average user, who typically prioritises features over privacy, aesthetics over performance, and ability-to-use over ability-to-customise. Your priorities may be different, but you can run your own website which does meet your priorities, and even a search engine of websites of which you 'approve'.
And yet practical experience shows the complete opposite: the average user prefers something simple from an aesthetic and functional perspective, and does not believe that there should be a trade-off between features and privacy (which is, in fact, correct).
I guess we need to establish what we're talking about here.
All those one-page ThemeForest sites with their whizz-bang animations, parallax scrolling and gazillion custom fonts are not the kind of sites I am holding up as good examples. There is a happy medium between RMS and those sites, and you can see it on sites like Facebook, Google, BBC, Trello, Basecamp, etc. It's no coincidence that the most successful sites are all rather well-designed.
If you walk into a cafe in the middle of London (or Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro) and showed three random users in a coffee shop, say, RMS's site and a BBC news page about an equally esoteric subject and asked them questions like:
* What did you learn by reading this page?
* What are your opinions of the author of this page?
then they are more likely to have positive thoughts about the BBC page than about RMS, because they are more likely to struggle with parsing the information on RMS's site, and because the RMS site simply looks 'broken' when compared to the rest of the internet.
> does not believe that there should be a trade-off between features and privacy (which is, in fact, correct)
There _is_ a trade-off between features and privacy. If I don't implement analytics, my resources are less likely to be spent efficiently, resulting in fewer features. Implementing an alternative to Google Analytics will use resources, so that will come at the expense of a feature. True, if you ask a user "should there be a trade-off between features and privacy?" they will say "no". But if you look at user behaviour, the majority of people don't care enough about privacy to give up the features. That's why Google and Facebook can be enormously popular despite their privacy invasions.
"Ordinary people" or whatever were quite capable of enjoying web sites, even personal hand-made terrible HTML pages on GeoCities, back when web sites were primitive.
I don't take it for granted that random people the world over would prefer BBC's site to rms's. It's an interesting claim, and I'd love to see actual results from such an experiment if someone were to try it.
_THAT_ is the beauty of the web.