> Has HN always had an issue with these sorts of pragmatic speech mis-queues where one posits that the experts are not aware of some painfully obvious solution?

Yes.

Mod dang has spoken about it a few times. Here's one example, but there are others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769453

Note the way he talks about it is less harsh than the way you talked about it, which may explain some of the downvotes.