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Interesting. This kind of seems like the software version of the efficient-market hypothesis from financial economics. It's pretty much obvious that markets have inefficiencies. But at the same time, they're the best we've got and constructing something that's better in general is really hard.

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Good analogy. I'd say the efficient markets hypothesis would be better interpreted as "you cannot deterministically identify an inefficiency", i.e. you're always assuming some amount of risk with any trade. You could probably make a similar case for improvements more abstractly - you cannot be perfectly confident a priori that something will be net value additive over the previous configuration.

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