John Smith I wrote:

I don't use commercial ware.

I once wrote a homebrew CW receive program in Atari Basic that actually did
pretty well on my old 800XL (if the conditions and sending fist were pretty
good).

I have used and incorporated into C/C++ programs I have created myself.

But I think you will find that most hams are like me. They are not
professionally in electronics or computers, and thus buy mostly commercial
radios and software.

A search of the net will turn up many freeware and open source programs
capable of fooling the best,

Do you mean a CW program that prints perfectly under all conditions found on the
ham bands? I assure you that no such animal exists.

I can hardly believe there is no commercial-ware which can't,

I doubt that there's much of a market for CW software. The vast majority of CW
ops are over 60 and dying off fast. Then the FCC won't force newcomers to learn
the code anymore so that market is gone. (I sure wouldn't have learned it if
they hadn't forced me to.) Since there's not much money to be made on a dying
market there's not much incentive to invest a lot of time writing the perfect
program. And I suspect most CW ops are like me and probably wouldn't buy it
anyway cause we would prefer to do it the old fashioned way anyway...

And trust me, long after your ear fails to copy solid, a good software utility can ...

We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. IMO the old computer between
the ears still does the best all around job, especially under poor conditions.