I think it is the general incompetence of the "academia + R&D biz + regulation pipeline". (In the land of the blind the one-eyed is king, etc.)
It's sort of inevitable in such a non-teleological process. As in each step in it serves its own purpose, and so the whole thing doesn't really serve the purpose that we like to assume for it - ie. give us great thoughtful inventions. That's why it took so long to stop the Theranos train, that's why it takes so fucking long to roll out polyvalent vaccines (ie. all-in-one vaccines), and so on. (I'm picking on medtech here but there are many others, the Boeing + FAA MCAS fuckup, the absolute limpdick paralysis of nuclear power - it needed a combination of half the world on fire + prelude-to-WWIII to get it moving again, and so on.)
