Yes, a lot of people forget the context that Socionics was created in. The whole idea is that everyone has a set role in society that they must fulfill, regardless of personal growth. Whether or not one agrees with this idea, it was present in the original intent.
Yeah, I get this. It seems Russian socionists were deeply ingrained in collectivist thought (naturally) when coming up with socionics. The result is a vision where each person depends on others and needs others to make up for their weak areas. Highly incompatible with Western notions of self-develoment...
The collectivism of communism is something most people reject nowadays though, I would imagine this is true in former Soviet countries too. The question then becomes: is there any way to change this, or is it impossible to change due to inherent features in the design of the system?
I don't think it's impossible to change. Gulenko offered advice for personal growth to each of the 16 types in his descriptions. I personally think the original blueprint for socioncs, as develloped by Aushra Augusta was very much just an outline of what was to come. Her work may have had a very limited perspective on human beings, but later socionists like Gulenko seemed get past this. Still, I still pick up the static view of human beings as being just a machine from authors like Golihov.
It seems even Jung with his cognitive functions saw very little possibility in terms of growth from the use of his "system" (Jung's functions weren't really a system), which is unusual for Jung. It seems the design may go back further than Aushra and all the way back to Jung - who it seems did not intend knowledge of his functions to be used for personal growth. Note that I could be wrong about this with Jung, as I've not studied him in depth, though I never understood how he intended to use his functions for growth.
Enneagram for example is very different. It was introduced by Gurdjieff who believed man was basically a machine in his natural state, that everyone was born a machine. But, said Gurdjieff, one can devellop into what he called the "sly man" that escapes this machine-like state into a state of quasi-godhood. So basically, said Gurdjieff, you are born machine, and most of us will stay machine. However it was possible for the initiated to escape this state. The ennegram was a tool to aid this initiation, but it wasn't a personality system per se. The nine points were states you could be at any given moment. When the enneagram became a personality system it became mixed in with pseudo-eastern/New-agey theories about the ego being bad; for Gurdjieff a strong ego was an escape from the state of being a machine. The enneagram however, retained its use a tool for personal growth, though the teleoolgy behind said growth has been lost.
This long post is basically to say that I don't know. It seems socionics is not a hopeless cause, it can be salvaged, but I don't know if its as useful as enneagram in its current state.
I also want to say: socionics is only as useful as it can be used as a tool for personal growth. Anything else basically a machine assigning another machine tasks. Not everyone has (or even could) be into the individualism of Gurdjieff: but personality typing must be useful as a system for growth, empowerment, etc. It cannot simply describe your given circuitry and say "this is what you are classified as and there's nothing you can do about it". That would be rather pointless.