It's probably less that they suck, and more that they aren't designed for the workload the developers want. Files are a good idea when you have exclusive write access to them at any given moment; less so, when you want to support concurrent access. Real-time collaborative creation happens at a finer level of granularity - people are manipulating individual aspects of documents, objects in the application's internal model. This doesn't work well when your atomic unit of synchronization is entire database.