Perhaps a broader issue is that the current system is the one that nobody designed. And, designing a certification system from scratch, that achieves any kind of widespread acceptance, may be impossible.

I see something similar happen on a smaller scale when a business tries to re-design a successful legacy product: The conditions that made it possible to design the original product no longer exist. Nobody really understands why the legacy product was successful, and the original designers are long gone -- they were "acqui-fired."

The legacy product might have a number of glaring shortcomings, but the re-design team ends up creating something that's worse.