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"their documentation was either vague or out of date. Half the time, I felt like I was cobbling fixes together from obscure forum posts rather than relying on official support"

Jeez! You just summarised my last decade working with software! Most kinds.

It wasn't this hard around the 2000's. Likely my age is a contributing factor, but experience should counteract that. But no. Software seems to go self serving more and more. Self serving the needs of the organization making the software. "Allowing" (more like delegating) users to help each other rather than robust support mostly through up to date and good documentation, in parallel of releasing unintuitive solutions so more training ours could be billed is something making every workin day a misery. Big part of the days are spent on satisfying the needs of the software (trying to figure out what now, mostly from random and outdated and tangentially relevant forum messages), rather than working the other way around.