Simple answer: you aren’t paying for monitoring. The money’s going into other things, which some of us find more valuable.
The interface absolutely sucks.
Oh, I’ve seen a lot worse, but sure, I’ll grant that there are prettier things in the world than MT GUIs.
The thing is, I’d rather the product be functional and flexible than that it be pretty, given the choice.
Take my AmpliFi Alien, from the company you prefer for UIs. I agree, it has a much prettier iOS app than MikroTik’s, but at the same time, it doesn’t have SSH, an open web UI, SNMP, event logging, proper VLAN support… In place of open VPN standards like WireGuard or open-core alternatives like ZeroTier, they want you to use their weak-ass Teleport feature. There’s more, but that list of counterexamples will do to be getting on with in our discussion here.
Point being, I want all of that a whole lot more than I want a pretty GUI. The only reason I haven’t replaced my Alien with something from MT is that I’m waiting for a WiFi 6 version of the RB5009. If I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, it’ll come in at about ¾ the cost of the Alien and do everything on that list of things the Alien won’t do besides. I won’t get a whizzy new UI, but you know what? I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the UI of my WiFi gear.
It looks like the U company have recently shut down their community forum in favor of effin’ Facebook, probably because it was turning into an endless list of all of the features their company refused to implement, for years and years. My read was that the cause was the very thing you’re complaining about here: for them, pretty UIs trump functionality. That’s great if the built-in software does what you want already (e.g. graphing traffic) but if you want it to do something else, and the U people won’t provide it, you’re stuffed.
At least with MikroTik you have the option of DIYing a better solution, in a lot of cases.
TheDude. A piece of software that makes me remember dedicated T1 lines.
So pick the SNMP monitoring system you like better, then. At least you have the option here, which you don’t with the U company until you step up into their pro line.
I just don’t understand why is so hard for MikroTIk
Good UIs are hard for everyone, not just for MikroTik. It costs serious money to employ talented graphic designers through the design and development of a new product, then to keep employing some subset of them past the big-push development effort in order to maintain those UIs, keeping them up-to-date with the changing landscape of smart devices and browsers.
Even the U company isn’t perfect on this. The iOS AmpliFi app has had a broken front-page UI for months on any phone smaller than about 5.5" because someone came along and thought they could cram more crap into it without adding scrolling, so now things either collide or get clipped off the edge on the smaller phones I prefer. This is doubtless because they shunted the project off to some developer without UI chops or a low-paid intern so they could redirect their UI designers to something newer and whizzier.
MT doesn’t abandon old products. If anything, they keep supporting them long past when they should’ve abandoned them. (e.g. ROS 7 on 10-year-old bare-bones MIPS boards.) The U company hasn’t shipped a new firmware for my Alien in months, and before that, there was a nearly 1-year dry spell.
If you ask me if I want better MT GUIs, the answer is, “Yes, of course,” but if you ask me if I’d rather have lots of features and flexibility and fixes or trade all that in for better GUIs, the answer is, “Hell no!”
their cheap $400 routers
Compared to what?
If you ignore WiFi, I find gear from the U company almost always more expensive per unit of functionality.
I’m curious which $400 router you’re talking about, if it isn’t the Alien.
The new hAP ax³ spanks the Alien on nearly every measure I care about. The only thing I want besides what they actually gave us is an SFP+ port to run the WiFi leg of my network back to my core switch. For a third the price, you get roughly the same WiFi specs, the same number of wired ports, the same top-line specs (routing, NAT, DNS caching…)
That makes the Alien’s price delta a pretty hard sell if all you want is a pretty iOS app that only runs on 5.5" phones or bigger.
some super long and shotty tutorial
It’s spelled “shoddy,” which I’d normally resist correcting you on, but I have to in this case because it’s the wrong word regardless.
While I believe I know the tutorial you mean, its primary problem isn’t being “made of inferior materials” but in being written by a non-native English writer. There’s a lot of that in the MT community, because it’s far more international than the American-centric U company communities. I believe this is a further reflection of the fact that U gear is a poor value for money, causing MT gear to appear more frequently where value/$ matters more. Alas, that means a greater proportion of tutorials are written by people who grew up speaking another language.
That’s one of the tradeoffs you accept when running MT gear: you often end up needing to translate ESL into actual English. 
some random software on a VPS/VM from GitHub which hasn’t been updated in 2-3 years.
Let’s tease that apart.
One, I’ll support you if your primary unease is installing random software from GH on your router without someone vetitng it for you first. There’s a lot of malware cropping up in this sphere, so yes, you do need to be careful, either on your own behalf, or in relying on some trustworthy party to vet things for you. GitHub and Docker Hub are not trustworthy parties in this regard; they’ll publish anything. The only question is how long a given piece of malware will stay up there before someone finds it, squawks about it, and manages to catch the attention of someone who can take it back down again. In the meantime, 10 new pieces of malware took its place.
But two, I have to push back on the idea that 3-year-old software is bad in the context of your thread’s primary topic. The graphing problem hasn’t appreciably changed in decades. It’s a finished problem. The only thing you might get from 1-month-old software over 3-year-old software is supporting some bleeding-edge graphing framework or some weird new UI aspect ratio. Woop, woop! 
a modern look to Winbox… this is 2022 and soon, 2023.
For a lot of us, “modern” means writing the network management clients against the router’s REST API in Go instead of Perl. That’s the space MT competes in, not in whizzy GUIs.
What a shame in 2023 to use grandpa’s device … time to buy the new fancy one with a big touch screen, pay functions, an internet connection and ability do remotely switch off whole company network with one big-enough-to-be-pressed-with-a-thumb-in-a-ski-glove-during-day-off button. Be brave