Settings are not a design failure
Most people don't love fiddling with settings. People love when software does what they need, and some of them will be willing to fiddle with settings if they have to. Settings are a cost the user pays (just like data entry, loading times, hard drive space, loss of privacy, ads, or the monetary price of the software) in order to get the value. If good defaults mean most users don't have to muck with settings, great, your software is now more valuable. But the only thing worse than having to tweak a setting to get your functionality is not being able to get your functionality at all.