I certainly agree with your last comment about WTF.
As you know it isn't a "new" problem. When I joined Sun Microsystems I was interested in learning what marketing folks did so I started work on that side of the house. One of the things they did was try to make the stuff sound as good as it could sound. So if you could sell something for 4999 you called it "Under $5000" and if your graphics card could do two million triangles / second you said "millions of triangles per second." When I transferred over to the kernel group to do development SunOS 3.2 had shipped and we were working on 3.5. There was a lot of pushback that adding things was pushing up the base system size such that 40 MB disk drives weren't going to have a lot of space left. Fortunately the cost of an 80MB disk was now down to the same price as the old 40MB one. The choice, as we saw it, was 'delete features to keep the size down' or 'have people get a bigger disk'. That wasn't particularly uncommon then or now in terms of tradeoffs.
On one of the developer panels at a user's group meeting someone asked me what would be the disk and memory requirements for SunOS 4.0 and my honest answer was we expected it to take about $400 worth of disk space and $800 worth of memory. It was a functionally correct answer (although not appreciated as you can imagine) because it took into account that the longer Sun worked on it the bigger the requirements got but the cost to buy the compute resources was staying flat relative.
As you know it isn't a "new" problem. When I joined Sun Microsystems I was interested in learning what marketing folks did so I started work on that side of the house. One of the things they did was try to make the stuff sound as good as it could sound. So if you could sell something for 4999 you called it "Under $5000" and if your graphics card could do two million triangles / second you said "millions of triangles per second." When I transferred over to the kernel group to do development SunOS 3.2 had shipped and we were working on 3.5. There was a lot of pushback that adding things was pushing up the base system size such that 40 MB disk drives weren't going to have a lot of space left. Fortunately the cost of an 80MB disk was now down to the same price as the old 40MB one. The choice, as we saw it, was 'delete features to keep the size down' or 'have people get a bigger disk'. That wasn't particularly uncommon then or now in terms of tradeoffs.
On one of the developer panels at a user's group meeting someone asked me what would be the disk and memory requirements for SunOS 4.0 and my honest answer was we expected it to take about $400 worth of disk space and $800 worth of memory. It was a functionally correct answer (although not appreciated as you can imagine) because it took into account that the longer Sun worked on it the bigger the requirements got but the cost to buy the compute resources was staying flat relative.