By the way, much of my career has been in utilities,...

By the way, much of my career has been in utilities, implementing customer care and billing solutions. When the electricity industry de-regulated in England I could not see how it would end up in cheaper prices for the consumer as every company in the chain from generator, distributor, retailer, meter reader etc needs to get their slice of the profits. Same goes for Australia.
Million of dollars is spent in back-end IT systems, and the wages of those who support them. The number of tarrifs and the complexity behind some of them is incredible. Every now and again I think that must be reflected somewhere on my bill, but it isn't. I have one rate.
Utilities constantly upgrade their IT systems, to 'improve service' or to 'better understand consumer needs'. It's not complicated, I just need a steady supply of electricity to my door, and I don't actually need to be 'delighted' by your customer service, in fact I never want to have reason to call in the first place!

The industry has now moved onto smart grid technology. The idea was that with smart meters we'd all be able to control our usage, and take advantage of lower prices at certain times of the day. I did point out that really the only things that could really change were a washing machine that could automatically go on in the middle of the night. Other than that I would still cook my dinner at the same time of day, require lighting wen the sun goes down, arise and put the kettle on at the same time each morning.

I've since moved out of utilities as I no longer am able to hide my disdain.

I've come to the conclusion that out of the 7 billion people on the planet, maybe a billion of us do something really useful, like grow food etc. The other 6 billion, like me, are just being kept busy. There's not really anything useful for us to do, so maybe the grand plan is to make everything as complicated as possible so that we are all employed trying to disect and analyse it.