The abysmal performance of the C64 floppy disk was due to a bug, but management went ahead and decided to ship it anyway. It was supposed to be 10x faster, thus the 3rd party ROM replacements.
The funny thing was, the same was true of Apple's DOS. With all the engineering talent including Woz's own, it never occurred to anyone there that they should have read the sectors in each track in descending rather than ascending order to save wasted disk rotations.