"What's the test?" and "What's the alternative?"
The two most powerful tools of thought, in my opinion, are the two questions: “What's the test?” and “What's the alternative?”.
It's easy to complain about anything. The problem is, complaining is also inconsequential.
Dissatisfaction is only ever useful when coupled with a proposed alternative and an argument for how can it be expected to be better.
Say I don't like looking up the weather forecast to check for rain because I'm annoyed it is often wrong.
There are two alternatives when planning outdoor activities: I roll the dice, or I check the forecast.
The test is, compared to never checking it, “is the weather forecast useful more often than not?”.
Weather forecasts aren't perfect and, in general, no solution is ever perfect for every case.
To be blunt, besides mathematical problems, there are often no solutions: only alternatives, which present different trade-offs.
Alternatives can be evaluated qualitatively, by estimating hypothetical outcomes, and quantitatively, by evaluating actual outcomes in controlled experiments.
More generally, instead of absolute platitudes like “X is good” and “Y is bad”, it's often more useful to establish nuance: “X is good, compared to Y, if we consider Z to be important”.