First off as a software engineer w/ web development as well the programmers don't make the decisions, they haven't made decisions in 20+ years. It's marketing and others that "White Board" the vision(s) and forward average users of webs don't understand how technology marches. If you want really blame something for changes in UI's and mechanisms of productivity decline it's the Smart Phone that is more responsible than any other mechanisms. Second to that would be trying get places to become standardized in handicapped access as a WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE ARE HANDICAPPED and for AGES the Internet has been a nightmare for them.
In reality you're blaming eBay upper management for what programmers are told to implement and yeah, those folks can get things wrong but making assumptions as to WHY things change are not simply "Try make it pretty." There are different "Software stacks" that come into play as technology moves and they can be wide varied from using far far less computing resources to being much easier to manage from a forward projection view of overall engineering. Often staying with what's old results in large expenses which would then be passed on as fee's to sellers.
In as far as Live Auction software its a vertical market application and as such the folks involved in design/creation tend "Do their own thing" .vs. any standardizations towards platforms being compatible. Some of that stuff can cost arm and leg. I remember some years back a fella I knew who raced Pigeons and the software used by the club to do that cost a WHOPPING $5500 annually... It's vertical market.
eBay is proprietary using hosts of other software stacks within the platform, some commercial, some open source.
There is a BIG DIFFERENCE in one having a webstore vs enterprise level computing that is eBay. Here we have connection servers, literally server farms with stacks and stacks of servers that do NOTHING but handle the connection. There are authentication servers and that's all the do. Every single time you or anyone else hits anything eBay, connection, authentication of EVERY SINGLE REQUEST. The internet is "Stateless" meaning that the STATE of you're access to ANY website is unknown unlike say Windows or you're phone which know when you've shut it off. Enterprise level web's are a completely different beast than pretty much anything else in the realms of computing and software engineering. If you're webstore sitting at $60 a year web with whatever the commerce application had 5,000 people hit it at once it come to a grinding halt. If you care pay $150/200+ a month can do that 5000 asynchronous connections.
One of the reasons webs have these fancier interfaces is something called Asynchronous Javascript. Javascript is a computer language built into the web browser. It allows for many things but one of them is being able to make changes within a web page without having to reload the entire page and thus all the assets and subsequent computer load accordingly. To put a paradigm to it, if you get a dirt spot on the hood of you're car would you rather expend all the energy washing you're entire car again by hand or just clean the dirt spot? Same same... Why reload the entire page calling on all those assets when can just do this little piece on demand. Further, having it broken down that way allows for better maintaining the code as well as making changes as needed to it towards future.
Now all that said and done very few marketers understand software engineering, very few software engineers understand marketing. Then atop all this there is upper management who wants results and these sides tend not get along all too well at times.
Marketing is far far far more complex than software engineering... We all here would like to say, "Oh, I understand marketing...." Trust me... No, 99.9% of us do not. Myself, I was taught it by three people one of which is a Politician, the other a former CMO at Amazon and the last a long since gone CMO when the word Yahoo actually meant more than the word Google.
One fella said his indi strorefront does good in Google Indexing. That's a relative as most folks think they do but they don't pay for the services that actually can show them real results or compare them to other similar sites. Atop that, Google shopping traffic is COMPLETELY different than someone searching for information on Mayan ruins. You'll get more organic traffic and purchasing if you go out to webs, make deals, hit forums to advertise towards targeted customers than you'll ever get via a search engine for private commerce webs... I know, I've built many of them for people over the years and understand the marketing.
As an example, some many moons back we'd a commerce storefront I'd done and our daily postal bill of $4 or $5 each parcel, we'd $400-$800 postal bills 5 days a week. We literally had a clerk assigned to us as we'd walk in with postal sacks they allowed us to keep. People think their webstores are doing good but usually are not doing 1/10th of 1% of capability but the owners refuse to learn what's needed towards driving maximum capabilities. It's a good deal of work and education... CMO's dont get those TREmendous paychecks because they happen be lucky.
Anyways... Like I said, you're barking at the wrong people when it comes to the engineers.
Regards,
