It’s a young field and we’re still entrenched in the consequences of the sort of mistakes that, in a few hundred years, will become “those silly things people used to do because they didn’t know better”.
Daily reminder that the web is a mess of corpo bullshit piled on top of 90s tech and most OSes currently in use are culturally from the early 80s.
The screw heads are mainly to prevent people from tampering with stuff they aren’t supposed to unscrew. Hard drives, for example, all use the same star-shaped heads that most people don’t have screwdrivers for.
I do think that people passionate about information technology – those who love it for the intrinsic awesomeness and not the money it brings – could break away with some of the legacy bullshit that holds back the quality of the software we use, if they were given the opportunity to defy software “tradition” and the profit motive. As of now, there is no systemic path forward, only occasional improvements incited by acute inadequacy of existing conventions for the growth of interested businesses.