That's a great point about experience teaching the topic. (I've written a few articles where I certainly wished for that experience.)
I just wish textbooks didn't have their own bad tendencies: they have pablum as an attractor, because on average students just want to get through the class, not doing too much worse than average among the other students. Even without this problem, there's a more basic one: like with enterprise software, the decision to buy the book is not typically up to the user. "Will people actually want to read this on their own time?" is a strong driver of quality, even though it has pitfalls too.
I just wish textbooks didn't have their own bad tendencies: they have pablum as an attractor, because on average students just want to get through the class, not doing too much worse than average among the other students. Even without this problem, there's a more basic one: like with enterprise software, the decision to buy the book is not typically up to the user. "Will people actually want to read this on their own time?" is a strong driver of quality, even though it has pitfalls too.