[wolvoleo]

Ehhh twisted pair came from the time of 10 mbit hubs. No processing or switching, every port heard every packet. Silicon was at a premium. Automatic switching between MDI/MDI-X would have made the hubs way more expensive. Only a few years before that we'd string the computers on a coax cable and had all kinds of nasty reflections when there was a literal kink in the cable or a terminator missing.

Compared to that, 10BaseT was easy mode. Someone who could manage to keep a coax network working had no difficulty making a cross cable.

By the time switches came along and then 100BaseT, auto MDI switching was no longer expensive and pretty standard. When gigabit came it actually became a requirement of the standard.