Placebos do "work", after a fashion, which is part of why they are used as a control rather than nothing being given to the control group (helping to assure blinding of participants, both subjects and experimenters, is also a factor.)

In fact, different mechanisms of placebo delivery "work" to different degrees (in many cases, injection-based placebos "work" better than ingestion-based.)

That's the placebo effect, not the placebo itself.

This is as simple as I can explain it.

1) People test a new medicine. 2) That medicine does no better than placebo. 3) That medicine does not work and the makers go back to the drawing board.

They don't sit around and wonder why that medicine "works", because it doesn't. Nor do they sell it as medicine, or claim it is effective, because it isn't. Homeopathy is no more interesting than every single failed medicine plus every single non-medical substance a person can put in their mouth.

Right. I perhaps wasn't sufficiently clear that I wasn't disagreeing with you in substance.