[ploxiln]

This is a curse of practicality and popularity, and you see it in other areas of computing.

Recently there have been some threads about filesystems, and how they don't provide exactly the guarantees that applications would find useful for providing their own guarantees on top. The reason is because filesystems had to deal with performance desires and many imperfect applications and hardware storage devices in the past. Trying for certain kinds/levels of "guarantees" just didn't make "market" sense, even in an open-source OS. And they do usually work remarkably well in practice ...