Sometimes things aren't "bad" per se, they just aren't as good. Wavelets seem to be another perennial also-ran in the image compression space. They work. They

Sometimes things aren't "bad" per se, they just aren't as good. Wavelets seem to be another perennial also-ran in the image compression space. They work. They have the odd useful property here and there. They just aren't as good for most purposes. There can also be differences in terms of investment; if hypothetically there were 3 techniques with roughly equally-useful "final forms", but only one of them gets that investment, then it'll win because there's no reason to pour the additional effort into the other two.