Sometimes it’s just an initial drop in quality, other times it’s permanent. My favourite example is book binding: hot-melt glue has completely supplanted cold g

Sometimes it’s just an initial drop in quality, other times it’s permanent. My favourite example is book binding: hot-melt glue has completely supplanted cold glue in mass production, despite being drastically inferior, because it’s (just barely) good enough, and it’s so much faster/easier/cheaper for production. Many aspects of computer setting of works for printing also show a significant regression in potential quality (prose, musical engraving, &c.), though the right software and proper human tweaking can balance that out—but people seldom actually do as much tweaking as would be done automatically by the experts of old. And as for text presentation on screen… well, that’s just lousy compared to what an expert setter would do. But it does adapt to different media with no or minimal effort required, doing in one second what used to take days, and that’s a rather big deal.