OK so this is a partial tangent - but I have a washing machine that annoys the hell out of me for this exact same reason (I know washing machine UI is not a hot topic usually but it damn well should be!)
It has a dial on the front to choose settings. Potentially a great idea to skip quick to the one I want - BUT the damn thing can only detect 1 step of change about every half second. So if you fast-turn it 4 clicks, it still only moves one step. So you have to stand there, slowly turning it, click, click, click, click....
The dial is the biggest design feature on there. Massive. Right in the middle. Bright lights all around it. But they couldn't even be bothered to make it solve the one problem it was there to do.
I always think that about modern SLR cameras. They took a series of brilliant, instantly accessible physical dials (around the lens for aperture, on the top for exposure) and replaced them with menus and buttons on a tiny screen. WHY? How is that progress?
I think if someone did a kickstarter for a very simple physical buttoned digital camera it would do very well.
Open it up, take the PCB out, figure out how the dial sensor works (the dial is probably just repeatedly nudging a contact out of the way), and thennn... program an Arduino to be a giant input buffer (that slowly replays), and wire the Arduino between the dial and the rest of the machine. :D
Caveat: said Arduino may need to sit between the rest of the buttons as well, in case inputs must be given in sequence.
Possible benefit: switch the Arduino for something from the ESP family, and you could feed instructions to the machine over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. (Which could take the form of a dedicated wireless button panel above the machine with macros for frequently-used options.)
(Hmm. I can tell there's some over-optimization in here, but I'm not sure _where_.)
You can tell the execs that approved that were probably impressed watching someone else demo it but probably never used it themselves.
Jobs would have spotted it was rubbish immediately.