Exactly that. Drivers don’t generally have much UI (I guess module load parameters count) so getting it working is most of the job.
It’s the user facing applications which sometimes feel a bit unpolished. That has definitely improved over the years though.
This is more about open source in general than Linux specifically, but anyway.
Minor details.
I get the impression that often the developers are passionate about getting things working, but once it works it’s hard to keep going to fix ‘papercuts’: minor UI issues, documentation, small usability improvements, consistency, etc. They want to move on to the next big feature.
Of course commercial products can suffer from the same, but if large enough they may have a program manager who assigns people to specific areas like that which get less coverage when it’s based on the devs’ desire to work on them.
This makes so much more sense than the Windows behavior.