You have it backwards. Excellent software becomes popular, and then becomes enshittified later once it already has users. Often there is a monopoly/network effect that allows them to degrade the quality of their software once they already have users, because the value in their offering becomes tied to how many people are using it, so even a technically superior newcomer won't be able to displace it (eg. Youtube is dogshit now but all of the content creators are there, and all of the viewers are there, so content creators won't create content for a better platform with no viewers and viewers won't visit a better platform with no content).

If your goal is to break into the market with software that is dogshit from day 1, you're just going to be ones of millions of people failing their get-rich-quick scheme.

I don’t think this search will really reveal speed of execution and feature set rewarded over quality either.