[fuckstick]

> That just goes to show the lack of design foresight.

You have a skewed perspective of growing up with ubiquitous computing and cheap ICs. This was very much not the case in the early 70s when CDs were designed. Trying to simultaneously design for high fidelity audio and a then completely theoretical demand for data storage would have made no sense and would be unjustifiable scope creep. The spiral groove of a CD is objectively better for a low cost linear playback device - even though it is obviously worse for random data access (though modern DSP mitigated this 15 years later). Engineering is about trade offs.

There’s no binary best effort vs dead sure - it’s a matter of degree, unlike the mistaken GP post, CDDA and CDROM both use RS error detection and correction, just the former has less of it - a CDDA (Redbook) can store about 15% more audio than would be possible with the equivalent WAVE files on a CDROM - at the expense of some redundancy, but it still has very robust error correction - otherwise every little tiny piece of dust would cause a skip. And for audio playback - trying to fill in a best guess is the right thing to do - rather than just making the thing spit the disk out with a failure.