I think a big reason for worse-is-better is that simple &quot;crappy&quot; solutions very often have better evolvability characteristics:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evolvability" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evolvability</a><p>&quot;Elegant and beautiful&quot; systems that are polished and perfect are often also brittle and monolithic and complex. Complex means hard to interoperate with, understand, and re-implement, and brittle means they can&#x27;t change with the times.<p>Complexity also favors single vendors due to the difficulty of interoperability and understanding. Xanadu would likely have ended up as Xanadu, Inc. with no third party implementations.