[burnte]

I didn't dismiss it at all. I directly answered you. While plenty of things change despite inertia, plenty of things do NOT change. We've known about the benefits of no till, cover crops, crop rotation, etc. for centuries and they're still not common due to inertia. In the USA we know that government subsidies for corn have massively distorted the market and had huge negative impacts on health and the environment, but we don't change due to inertia. Water management something we're terrible at in the US despite having the knowledge of how to do it better, but we don't because of inertia. Don't underestimate the power of "we've always done it this way." People can come up with a thousand bad reasons not to do something.

In my company, another leader forced his division to stop using a manual tracking spreadsheet because it was wasting time. People HATED the idea of stopping it, expecting there to be huge issues, but the manager was right, all the information was already reliably recorded in other systems and this was just a wasteful manual copy. When people stopped using it, literally nothing went wrong or changed, no one needed it, but now everyone got back 15 minutes of their day. But people resisted because "we've always done it this way."

As another poster said, grain loss is more likely with these less-hand-labor-intensive methods, and people can overvalue the loss of that small amount despite the time and energy savings of scythes. So people might think, "I'll lose 3% of my harvest doing that, I can't afford that" except they'd expend 15% of the energy harvesting and thus that 3% loss is more than balanced out by the 85% time savings and the reduced work load. You can spend a fraction of that saved time making up the 3% difference in a hundred other ways.

People are very resistant to change. A lack of education produces lapses in logic and critical thinking and thus people won't evaluate the change in the right frame of reference.