I think you're circling the definition I most closely align with which was coined by Gerald Weinberg - "Quality is value to some person". You can have the best looking interface and the cleanest codebase, but if nobody is getting value from your software, who cares? If somebody is getting a ton of value from your software they're more forgiving of defects they run into.

There isn't some intrinsic value to software, it's gotta be used by somebody

I'm not sure about that definition. If your software solves a problem that many users face, that makes it useful and, presumably, valuable, but it doesn't mean it's of higher quality than niche software of relatively little use.