It's just a broken, entrenched system.
I personally know a CEO who moved to SV, was worth something like $100m+, and the bank wouldn't give him a home loan because he didn't have the right credit score yet.
He was literally building his credit with an Amex using their global transfer system.
On the other hand, FICO scores are so easy to game that once you get a couple of cards going, you can leverage those to get more cards, etc, etc and optimise your score that way.