Customers! Customers! Customers!
We sucked; the Web (the thing that your neighbor or mine browse to read news, buy stuff, contact the Administration...) as it is today is almost exactly equal, on the client's side, to what it was back in 1998 when CSS 2 was released. We did not suck a little bit, we sucked a lot. We sucked because our world of techies is too far away from the User, from the Web author, because we think our implementors' expectations are the market's expectations. In other terms, we sucked because we are unable to listen, and that's a very serious observation.
Glazblog - Future of HTML and the Web, part 1