Worse is better is simply a local maxima of features - schedule - cost tradeoffs, and there not being enough of a sustained investment to "hop out" of the local

Worse is better is simply a local maxima of features - schedule - cost tradeoffs, and there not being enough of a sustained investment to "hop out" of the local maxima. When those maxima are things like operating systems and programming language ecosystems, those are very very big hops to make.