[brockwhittaker]

> One of those things that perhaps it would have been better that they had not invented.

I think you're off base on this. The ensuing financial mishaps just made the model better, but the creation of Black-Scholes brought us from 0% to 90% of the way to where we are today, where modern derivatives insure product price swings for almost everything across the world. Since then, a patch-work of model changes have brought us closer to perfect pricing through the realization that many markets have higher kurtosis.