[michaelmrose]

Why are there so many different kinds of cars, houses, razors, cereals, fruit, music, phones!

Think of all the time we would save if we would save if we drove to work in our Yugos, listening to bubblegum pop on our zunes before sitting down at our DOS workstations to write cobol!

You can't just pick a set of present day winners in the marketplace of ideas and pretend you can wave a wand and relocate all the labor that went into what you now think are the best things and make them even better. We arrived at our present day through an open marketplace where people were free to branch off and create and the resulting ideas cross fertilized. If you go back far enough all of the things you now regard as best in class were at some point an upstart which according to your priorities would be dismissed in favor improving something that by now is extinct because as things progressed it was deemed too inferior to continue improving.

In fact best being pretty subjective and its highly unlikely that most would even agree at any point in time which ought to be worked on and which abandoned and its entirely likely that if you convinced someone not to work on option B or C their labor isn't magically added to A. You may have noticed that individual projects have a certain vision on how their project is going to progress and B and C exist specifically because their vision differs from A. Deprived of the outlet of making B those developers might take on more commercial work or they might go fishing.

It's likely that an ecosystem that believed in your perspective to be impoverished by lack of choice but its unlikely for what you imagine the winners to be enriched. In fact many of them might not even exist.