Some people seem to believe in an "ideal world" and let that interfere with interacting with actual reality in a practical way. Things need to be backwards compatible with user experience to succeed. New designs sometimes simply are not that.
http://www.economist.com/node/196071
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-t...
In other words, the ubiquity of QWERTY represents a failure of the current mode, where "the market" is behaving with an irrational obsession with the short term. Likewise, preserving a worse facebook design indefinitely because it might require effort to adapt to seems obviously misguided.
I suspect that the issue here is what is and isn't better. I don't know if I buy that previous changes that sparked outrage were improvements, and I think it's possible that people really were reacting to liking the new system less, not just that it was unfamiliar.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.