I've found ddrescue does a good job recovering data from bad media by doing strategic retries. But mostly ... I don't have need of a utility like this since I

I've found ddrescue does a good job recovering data from bad media by doing strategic retries. But mostly ... I don't have need of a utility like this since I started using zfs. I don't think less demand for this type of tool means hard drives are better now. I think in today's world of periodically trashing broken devices rather than attempting repair, most normies just ignore this problem space. They might put something really important on an online service, other than that they accept data loss when shit breaks, and get a whole new laptop or whatever.