I have a feeling that "almost getting there" will simply become the norm. I have seen a lot of buggy and almost but not exactly right applications, processes and even laws that people simply have to live with.
If US can be the worlds biggest economy while having an opiod epidemy and writing paper cheques, if Germany can be Europes manufacturing hub while using faxes, sure we as a society can live in the unoptimal state of everything digital being broken 10% of the time insteaf of hald percent
This seems to be the way of things. Oral traditions were devastated by writing, but the benefit is another civilization can hold on to all your knowledge while you experience a long and chaotic dark age so you don't start from 0 when the Enlightenment happens.
Years back I worked somewhere where we had to PDF documents to e-fax them to a supplier. We eventually found out that on their end it was just being received digitally and auto-converted to PDF.
It was never made paper.. So we asked if we could just email the PDF instead of paying for this fax service they wanted.
There was a comment here on HN, I think, that explained why enterprises spend so much money on garbage software. It turned out that the garbage software was a huge improvement on what they did before, so it was still a savings in time and money and easier than a total overhaul.
I wonder what horror of process and machinery the supplier used before the fax->PDF process.
I once worked on a janky, held-together-with-duct-tape-and-bubblegum distributed app written in Microsoft Access. Yes, Microsoft Access for everything, no central server, no Oracle, no Postgres. Data was shared between client and server by HTTP downloads of zipped-up Access .mdb files which got merged into the clients' main database.
The main architect of the app told me, "Before we came along, they wer doing all this with Excel spreadsheets. This is a vast improvement!"
If US can be the worlds biggest economy while having an opiod epidemy and writing paper cheques, if Germany can be Europes manufacturing hub while using faxes, sure we as a society can live in the unoptimal state of everything digital being broken 10% of the time insteaf of hald percent