"Worse is better" comes from an ancient story where the Lisp folks were trying to design an elaborate system for resuming interrupted syscalls, and the UNIX folks just returned a "we fucked up" error to the caller instead. People take different lessons from this. Personally I feel like this is one of the earliest software forms of YAGNI: the (lack of) severity didn't merit the engineering effort to "fix" it. But, OP's interpretation is also valid.