Optics were not a solved problem in the 30s they wouldn’t be until the 80s at least for camera lenses. 30s camera lenses were optimized for black and white and very poorly corrected for chromatic aberrations. Well corrected color lenses wouldn’t become common until the 50s. Optics bigger apertures than f4 were expensive and often had severe aberrations. Coatings which prevent internal reflections didn’t mature until the late 60s/early 70s. Up to this point lenses had concentrated on a few well known good optical formulas. In particular high quality zoom and ultra wides were tremendously expensive r&d efforts with bespoke manufacturing[1]. This local maxima wouldn’t be breached until computer aided design and manufacturing processes became the norm leading to aspherical, extra dispersion elements and much higher element counts becoming common. By this point camera lens development has become much more iterative many lenses from the 90s and 2000s are 70s/80s optics with slight coating updates with a plastic auto focus housing.

1: see the achromatic Takumar with quartz elements that was produced in a very limited run for scientific laboratories. And aspherical low aperture lenses like the leica noctilux which required hand grinding the aspherical element.