This is not a story about 2nd rate thinking or a mediocre or bad software product. When a freshmen flunks a semester because he got a new video game, it is not because the video game's designers were 2nd rate.

And Wall Street attracts people seemingly as smart as you would ever want to be. Read Roger Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed" about how a coupla Nobel Prize winners in econ started a hedge fund (Long Term Capital Management) which blew up spectacularly in 1997. Other smart people knew what they were doing wrong, but that didn't matter to the people who saw how much money they were making over the few years they survived.