I think the problem is that it is an actual hard problem which is not trivial to solve. There are just so many different parts and they all come in different ve

I think the problem is that it is an actual hard problem which is not trivial to solve. There are just so many different parts and they all come in different versions (packaging, industrial - automotive - military, etc.) with productions sites all over the world. I am actually pretty impressed by sites like octopart, how well they organize all that data and I am not quite sure what they could do better. But of course it's true, electronic products have so many different components and even one small missing component can cause havoc.