Technical merit aside, its sockets and cables absolutely defied any attempts to line up and insert by touch.
Want to plug in a new device? You'd damn well better move the tv out because otherwise you're going to spend at least ten minutes with your arm round the back of the tv, fruitlessly wiggling the plug around the general area of the socket, and then you're going to pull the tv out and look anyway. Even if you were exactly on target with the cable, you weren't getting it in without sub-millimetre precision and there was no real way to tell when to apply the force.
SCART is the worst connector ever designed, that is true. Not only it is difficult to plug in, it is also super flimsy and it will unplug if you glance at it wrong.
But on the other hand it provided the best possible picture quality (on consumer TVs) until the arrival of HDMI. Compared to composite video, it was marvellous.
But its you who is trolling. CRT gun is driven with RGB signals, every TV has to convert cvbs/svideo/component input to RGB anyway. Allowing raw RGB input simply skips unnecessary conversions.
You are so right. There is a reason why PC and arcade monitors work in RGB.
But in addition to that, there is no cross-talk, no dot crawl, and all the other weird artifacts of composite video. Also, no chroma modulation means that it was much easier for TVs to support both 50 and 60 Hz. I only ever had a GameCube, but being able to play in RGB at 60 Hz was amazing.
At least in Europe, many old consoles* provided native RGBS output, and with the proper SCART cable the video quality was awesome. Nowadays, people in the retro gaming community go crazy with PVM/BVM and other fancy professional monitors with RGB input, but the French already had it figured out in the '70s!
* anything from Sega, Nintendo SNES~WiiU, the NeoGeo, Sony PSX~PS3.
Why so angry? Thanks to French everyone and their mother in Europe had a TV with RGB (not to mention Svideo) input for that perfect non pixel crawly always the same color picture from VCRs, Cable/Sat set top boxes, fourth gen and up game consoles, and finally 16bit home computers.
Meanwhile in US video inputs were somehow used for market segmentation with consumers forced to use RF modulators :o and later CVBS with a very brief couple years of Component input availability on HDTVs around 2000.
SCART could carry 480p, but few devices supported it.
In any case, this was only an issue in the 6th generation of consoles (Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox). Before that era, everything was 15 kHz, and after that, everything started to include HDMI. The 6th generation was caught in between.
Technical merit aside, its sockets and cables absolutely defied any attempts to line up and insert by touch.
Want to plug in a new device? You'd damn well better move the tv out because otherwise you're going to spend at least ten minutes with your arm round the back of the tv, fruitlessly wiggling the plug around the general area of the socket, and then you're going to pull the tv out and look anyway. Even if you were exactly on target with the cable, you weren't getting it in without sub-millimetre precision and there was no real way to tell when to apply the force.
They were such a bad design.