But what if I want a faster horse?

I think Spotify was perfect in 2008. I think people's need to justify their existence by constantly doing things creates an unfortunate incentive where perfect products are mutated beyond recognizability.

(This coupled with the tendency to hire more people as you get more popular, you have more people mutating the thing. Also novelty bias...)

In those early days the Spotify user experience needed to try and differentiate and put up barriers to being copied. Later it suffered from being purely metric driven and tracking things like user-engagement thinking it's a proxy for happiness with the platform. And then later still they start to mostly care about the cost of delivery.