There's hardware bloat too. Old fart example: In the days of analog SD TV, the "foolproof" way to feed video into your TV was an RF modulator. The "proper" w

There's hardware bloat too. Old fart example: In the days of analog SD TV, the "foolproof" way to feed video into your TV was an RF modulator. The "proper" way was via direct video input of some sort. The "even more proper" way was an RGB type interface. Except by the end it hardly mattered any more. RF modulators and tuners had gotten so good, that perfectly adequate video resulted from the RGB -> composite -> RF -> composite -> RGB chain. Bloat, but who cares? In an automobile, the "proper" way to charge a phone is to have a 12VDC->USB type of adapter plug. The "bloat" way is to have a 12VDC->120VAC inverter and then plug the phone's existing wall charger into that. More circuitry, but it gets the job done and it's cheap. If you like designing electronic gadgets, the "proper" way to flash an LED is two transistors and a couple of resistors and capacitors to build an astable multivibrator. The modern way is to program up a small 8-pin microcontroller. A CPU running thousands of lines of code just to blink an LED? Who cares. If your computer/tablet/phone are reasonably recent it's the same for software. It's only when your gadget is a few years old that you really see the bloat as formerly performant software "degrades" in later versions.