Earlier quoted context omitted.
>to create an essentially perfect terminal/console Because they thought terminals are outdated and no one cares about them or/and it isn't a flashy enough addition for marketing.
Casey has shown how few resources it really requires.
The approach Casey took is very obvious to game developers, and very foreign to other people, I would think. We're all still so poisoned by OOP and the normalization of unnecessary complexity that straight-forward solutions often don't occur to us.
Casey's misstep here is the same misstep that many of us make, and have made; the assumption that everyone should know something or understand it just as well. It is often hard for an individual to believe that something which they find obvious could be so out of reach of another person.
One might respond to that with "A Microsoft employee should know this kind of thing," and to that I would ask where they're supposed to get this "Microsoft people should know" knowledge. Where's this "Microsoft should know" academy? What is the list of things that an employee of a company like Microsoft should always know in order to be forgiven by the argumentative HN patron? There isn't a place for them to go, of course, they can only rely on their experience and their colleagues to help them do their work, the same as everyone else, and every person, team, and company has blind spots. Every last one.