If its really inneficient, its like, whats the point? Its easier from a manufacturing standpoint to make something cheaper than more efficient. The efficiency often lies with the underlying physics and often hits a hard theoretical limit that can't be passed because it violates thermodynamics, or something like that. If you came up with an amazing system that was horribly expensive to produce but waaay more efficient than everybody else, you'd still get rich because some large technology company would buy it and figure out how to use scale and other techniques to bring the price down. Just like plasma TVs. They cost an order of magnitude less than they did 7 years ago, but their picture quality hasn't changed by an order of magnitude. (its hard to measure picture quality in quantitative terms, but you get the point).