A cultish devotion to "performance" and a refusal to revisit tradeoffs that were for hardware literally 10 million times slower than today's systems is the real plague of our industry. Yes, IEEE 754 was a towering technical achievement in its day (though its use is marred in practice by an industry that implemented only the most problematic of its rounding modes and ignored the trapping mode that should have been the default as soon as hardware performance improved a little), no-one's denying that. But it's got a lot of sharp edges (that were necessary at the time; indeed IEEE 754 makes significant performance compromises compared to e.g. Cray non-754 floating point modes) that a mature industry would not expose by default.