They are businesses. Their customers are mostly businesses. SHA1 is, for most businesses that only want a padlock to reassure their customers, just peachy. A CA that hassles their customers and says "you need to do complicated extra work" is put at a disadvantage to other CA's that have a "customer is always right" kind of attitude. Combined with tools that default to SHA1, and customers that may depressingly actually have Windows XP SP2 terminals still in production use, and you get feet dragging.
I don't think this is inherently a problem with the CA model. Rather it's what you'd expect in a competitive market that is basically selling a binary commodity product (a padlock icon), given textbook economics.