Right versus pragmatic
There are lots of examples of this. Moralistic thinking simply isn't productive in this context. If you build an economic system that depends on everyone voluntarily cooperating rather than acting self-interestedly, self-interested people will ruin it; if your public health strategy for HIV is to discourage people from extramarital sex, lots of people will have extramarital sex and get HIV; if your strategy to compete with BitTorrent is to try and make people feel guilty about using BitTorrent, people will tune you out and use BitTorrent.Of course, if you used those examples instead of a silly example about designing an office restroom, the HN thread gets derailed by people talking about economics or HIV. One could criticize the HN community for that kind of bikeshedding, but it's more pragmatic to just use a boring, contrived example to sell the point. Certainly, a HN thread won't end up filled with a side discussion about office restroom design.