You didn't insinuate it, but you also aren't being specific about the kind of help you're asking for. You're making enormously broad statements about at least two different professions that solve different problems in different ways. I don't believe I am being unfairly critical of your phrasing.

I'm guessing you're reading into my statement, "I'm guessing when you ask for help with your code, you're not expecting someone to develop an entire application for you, for free." I'm not suggesting you are personally asking for an entire design for free (although you would not be the first if you were).

Rather, I'm saying that, if you don't understand your design problem well enough to ask a narrow-enough question of the right sort of designer (as you might with an engineer about a technical issue), then the person you're asking has to understand -- and potentially educate you about -- a much larger portion of your project. That sort of time investment only comes with payment.

I was a developer once, a long time ago, and I don't recall ever asking strangers or even friends to review my code. At least, not successfully. Are there actually places you can go and have random programmers look at your code? How do they run it? How do they build it? How do they understand your business logic? How are they able to duplicate your production environments? I feel as if your counterexample is a straw man. Code reviews amongst other people on your production team is not the same thing at all.

Dribbble is not a place for critique. It is a place for praise, specifically, between visual designers and artists. Only some of that overlaps with UI. Most people don't post in-progress work there, and Dribbble is not designed to facilitate critique of in-progress work when they do. So, that's not a great example.

Also, it's rare to actually be seeking "open-ended design help." If you have an MVP already, then you're already talking with a designer too late. There is a limited amount of change you will be willing to tolerate to your MVP, in very particular places, dealt with in very particular ways. It's the button color example from my first post again. Your MVP might not need a button color change. You might need to throw your whole MVP away. You are probably not prepared to do that.

I have talked with perhaps a hundred different startups through office hours in the past three years or so. Most startups want a pat on the head. They're not prepared to make any design-related changes at all, not to colors, not to copy, not to anything. Some startups are prepared to make superficial, cosmetic changes, but most designers aren't interested in helping you put lipstick on a pig. Designers do that all day long as their day job; they want a bigger impact if they're doing it for fun. Nearly no startups are interested in understanding how to figure out the real design problems in their product and how to solve them; that is, how to find product-market fit, and are willing to throw away all their existing work if necessary to do so. I could probably count those startups on one hand.

I have absolutely had people get up and walk out mid-sentence when I pointed out irredeemable problems with their idea, MVP, or launched application. That is not the kind of feedback most people are willing to hear "for free."

And if you are prepared to throw your MVP away, then you're stuck, because if you ask anything else of the designer at that point, that's real work, and they're not going to do that for free.

I think good free help can be obtained if you can ask a narrow-enough question of the right sort of designer, absolutely.

In my experience, though, that question is hardly ever the right question you should be asking.