[cbsmith]

I think you're being a bit presumptuous about institutions whose lifespan have yet to be determined. It's not like practices from successful long-lived institutions were ignored.

The examples you cite suffer from a reality that in many ways those institutions survived for so long in name only. They have transformed significantly enough from one generation to the next as to be largely unrecognizable as the same entity beyond comparative trivialities of language/ceremonies etc. If you pulled together snapshots of them from various points in time and put them together, they'd often be at cross purposes.

Of course, the same criticism could be leveled at the post-WWII institutions, but those institutions were defined more by their purpose than their mere existence, so it was "pioneering" in terms of the effort to maintain said purpose, even if in many ways they've failed. I do think looking at the ways they've failed despite design intent and historical knowledge applied to them is potentially very interesting.