The really crazy thing is that we had great proposals for much better layout systems, and they were rejected:

- First, the model with "springs and struts", employed by all major native GUIs for decades, and also implemented in Firefox as the first Flexbox model (for XUL, the UI description markup language) since ages.

- Second, the constraints-based layout model, now employed by OSX 10.8 and considered even superior, was proposed in 1999! http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/web/ccss-u...

The only explanation I can come up with is a giant disconnect between users (web developers) and implementors.