The main reason you can't make a truly universal USB cable is the same reason you can't make a universal ethernet cable. You can make a cat5e cable, you can make a cat6 cable, you can make a cat8 cable. But you can't make a cable that's guaranteed to support anything.
Currently there are four common speeds/specs for the high-speed lanes: none, USB 3.0 at 5GHz, USB 3.1 at 10GHz, Thunderbolt 3 at 20GHz.
Cables that can support the higher speeds without signal loss issues tend to also be increasingly short. That's another issue getting in the way of an ideal cable; it's hard to carry such high frequencies to the same distances.
There's no tradeoff between speed and 100W support, but most cables do lack 100W support for whatever reason.
A lot of cables (even from Apple and Google) pick the "none" option for high speed lanes. Such a cable can only run at USB 2.0 speed and is often called a "charging-only" cable. (True charging-only cables are significantly more rare. They also probably violate the spec.)
Currently there are four common speeds/specs for the high-speed lanes: none, USB 3.0 at 5GHz, USB 3.1 at 10GHz, Thunderbolt 3 at 20GHz.
Cables that can support the higher speeds without signal loss issues tend to also be increasingly short. That's another issue getting in the way of an ideal cable; it's hard to carry such high frequencies to the same distances.
There's no tradeoff between speed and 100W support, but most cables do lack 100W support for whatever reason.
A lot of cables (even from Apple and Google) pick the "none" option for high speed lanes. Such a cable can only run at USB 2.0 speed and is often called a "charging-only" cable. (True charging-only cables are significantly more rare. They also probably violate the spec.)