It's because software design is guided by individualized, balkanized, competitive, hierarchical human incentive, rather than public incentive. The extraneous branching and churning of what amounts to the formal, ever-evolving definition of all human interaction and knowledge: one might define modern computing as this. To accomplish this branches must be deleted over time and unified in order to properly abstract and make infinitely useful the definition. Branches are useful in uncertainty, in areas where discoveries are still being made. Branches become impediments in settled areas and Babel-tower formation begins, increasing brittleness. It's the human-knowledge equivalent of Keynesian hole-filling, but the price one pays for this is software duplication, increasing computational complexity, and increasingly less interoperable systems for like things. Sometimes lightning strikes and we have to build all the rooms again, but that happens at the bottom of the tower up. I think the role of the State should be to unify these conditions over time, so as not to create extraneous noise, confusion, human-churn and suffering, and material resource waste.