<p>The dissemination of care robots, conceived as (part of) the answer to address the increase of care staff shortage and the burden of older adults’ relatives in aging societies, remains limited so far, despite a strikingly growing number of experiments conducted with older citizens living in institutions and at home, and ambitious political plans and programs to foster their development and adoption. This can be related to an enduring need for human therapists and caregivers to make them socially engaging and operational in practice, especially when care recipients suffer from various kinds and levels of physical and/or cognitive impairment, and poor usability even when these systems are designed following “user-centric,” “human-centered,” or “participatory design” approaches. This contribution has as its core objective, beyond amending widespread views about care robotics as a relatively late field of research in robotics, to show that during its first two decades, participatory design encompassing early involvement of representative users in the design process, effective contribution to the designed product and decisional power on design (re-)orientations were standard practices. Secondly, it shows that therapists and caregivers’, once highly valued as (co)-users of assistive robots, became sidelined in most design processes, as acceptability was given priority over usability in the second half of the 1990s. Eventually, it advocates for a “radical participatory design” approach, inspired by the historical roots of assistive robotics and recent attempts to reimagine technology design for older adults, achievable by enabling <i>all</i> users—older adults as well as therapists and caregivers—to participate as equal partners and directly influence all design decisions by promoting double-edged expertise, design as calibration, and open-ended journeys of technology development.</p>