We see the same in other areas. Desktop OS's are not appreciably faster now than they were 30 years ago, despite exponential rises in memory, storage and proce

We see the same in other areas. Desktop OS's are not appreciably faster now than they were 30 years ago, despite exponential rises in memory, storage and processor capacity. Better looking, yes, but not faster. Games have maintained roughly the same performance for 20 years. However, the number of polygons has risen exponentially. There's a minimum acceptable performance for most systems. If you exceed that, no-one cares (the extra performance is wasted). So every system hits that minimum performance level and spends the rest of the budget on appearance (or configurability, or ease of editing, or whatever). Wordpress is slower than flat HTML. But the average web browser and connection is fast enough to serve Wordpress content in an acceptable time for the user. The "extra" budget was spent on making it easier to create the content.