Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I hope my additional remarks are
taken as sincere and not in any way personal, except in a good way.

> My tone here is borne out of users shooting themselves in the foot

Frustration. I hear you. Sure, it's frustrating that they exercise
choice (however misguided you see that) and then "complain". It's very
nice if you've written code, and even nicer that you care for your
customers. But, as developers, they aren't our children. I've been
there and it's galling, and feels like a rejection, but to accept what
is unrequited is sometimes harder than giving it.

> the choice to do the thing that is good for them,

This is the elitists' dilemma. Please don't be insulted by that word,
I'm using it literally and appropriately without value judgement (I am
foremost an elitist, and secondarily a peoples' champion, and it is a
position that can only ride on a measure of arrogance - which must be
tempered)

The fact is, it's not your computer. And that really is the long and
short. One must respect that if "users" do not wish to take advantage
of bug fixes more speedily available through telemetry, then it's
their choice to have suboptimal, buggy programs.

In other news, our children will listen to shit music and get into
drugs and relationships we disapprove of etc.

> We have shown Microsoft that we simply will not update our operating
system or even reboot unless forced.

For very good reasons. Microsoft have shown themselves to be utterly
untrustworthy. I really don't think that's even debatable. And it's a
shitshow because I do not believe trust can ever be repaired. It
leaves the reality that one of the biggest vendors on the planet is in
the position of forcing users because it has squandered the
reputation necessary to do good-faith business, to propagate its
updates. That's tragic because they probably see no way out except
doubling down on abuse, authoritarianism and beating users to their
will - and ultimately that confrontation will be the end of so much we
have built.

What makes this worse is that security is about more than personal
choice (think vaccinations). In other words the damage that Microsoft
(and other big-tech abusers) have done goes far beyond simply
destroying the individual trust relations with their
customers. They've corroded the social fabric of trust in computer
security at a more general level - a cost that is incalculable.

> people do not think about those things logically.

You are right. And we should not assume that they should. Emotion is a
powerful reasoning tool, and only a fool ignores that force of
psychology. Once burned twice shy - and we as developers have been
burning a lot of peoples' fingers these past 30 years.

> I don't know how else to say it. It's not a matter of tone so much
as it is a matter of fact.

I see it means a lot to you. That is a good thing in itself. You care,
which is x10 above the norm.

But we cannot force them to be what we wish them to be. Especially not
"for their own good" which is where all tyranny begins. We cannot
force people to adopt products, customs, behaviours, sing the party
line, or any of that hegemonic nonsense without invoking an age of
"consumer communism".

It saddens me that in 2022 we still need to address the patrician
attitude. It's not the way forward. It's sad to see such a
deterioration. But so long as companies like Microsoft persist a
culture of smug superiority, cavalier conceit and intransigent
disrespect to the dignity of their users we will have to accept "fuck
you" decision making. And frankly, more power to those courageous
enough to say it.