[michaelochurch]

Excellent metaphor. I agree.

No one (to my knowledge) is suggesting "conspiracy" or malicious intent, or even incompetence. Hardware designers know what they're doing, and on the tradeoff between maximizing performance vs. making performance simple, the former is usually the best option.

[Umn55]

It's all about limits, as systems grow in size and complexity and do more computational work you can build more massive systems. But at the same time the programming/maintenance work requires grows.

So you either need

1) a smarter approach 2) focus on whether the problem is tractable or not 3) If you're going to be ambitious you're going to have to pay for it.

Human beings aren't really known for their wisdom however.