This is the difference, and why we can never understand each other.

I couldn’t care less how much customers like something; what matters to me is if it’s technically perfect.

This is also why I will never be happy at any job, because it turns out technical perfection doesn’t pay the bills.

I generally agree with you, but if you only care about technical perfection, it can happen that something is "technically perfect", but insufferable to use.

For example, I'm sure many of the common command-line utilities are considered technically perfect by their developers, but outside of some common use cases you've memorized, they are all a pain to use because of how undiscoverable CLI is by its nature. The "wrong input, go read some manuals" style of error messages doesn't help either.

I myself always start from user requirements and work my way down from there.