You don't understand
Designers are in the sales and marketing business. Sales and marketing *bring cash in* because they're fundamentally about *persuasion* - which is the only factor that really matters to sales.
Because of the way this culture is set up, many many 'technology' companies sell mediocre, flawed or broken products. They can do this because if sales and marketing are good enough, customers are so awed, dominated, or monopolised they will put up with inconvenience.
Even if they hate the product, even if it barely works at all, they can still be made to buy it. (q.v. Microsoft, and not a few big enterprise big names.)
The user experience is a relatively small part of the persuasion process. Superficial design and/or hard sell and/or monopoly building and/or evangelism are far more influential.
This is why making things work gets less traction with management than making things sell.
Now - you can argue that crayons aren't all that good at persuasion. And that's partly true. In fact, some are useless and a danger to themselves and others. But some are very good at adding a layer of want on top of something quite ordinary.
Thing is, being in the persuasion business they only need to be able to *sell themselves.*
Engineers typically don't have a clue about this. Engineers care about solving problems for their own sake and making widgets and thingummies, not so much about the persuasive leverage widgets and thingummies exert on customers or management.
Which, incidentally, is why Apple did so well under Saint Steve. Apple's ability to create a near-mystical ownership experience is far more important to customers than Apple's software, which is often less than stellar.
E.g (I hope) no one is going to claim that iTunes is a best of breed music manager. But if you compare it with - say - VLC, which has network control and all kinds of other 'clever' extras, but can't save and restore EQ curves correctly, it's obvious that leaving engineers to design things without external management works even less well.
Bottom line is that if coders want to feel some management love they need to learn to play the persuasion game.
The only exceptions are master engineers who do truly insanely cool stuff. But there aren't many of those around. And just being a competent - even a very competent - code monkey doesn't cut it for Rest of World.