Except for the fact that more than a decade later this great failure has not managed to make Wikipedia any less useful the vast majority of the world's population.

The fact of the matter is that regardless of the OP's whinging, a new model for encyclopedic knowledge was desperately needed for the late 20th century. Britannica and World Book were hopelessly embarrassing themselves with out of date content, and their vision for an online model of the products looked remarkably similar to their dead-tree models, including huge lead times to get changes made to specific entries.

Wikipedia, for all it's tribal bullshit, remains the gold standard of knowledge retention. And if it turns of people like the OP from contributing, that stinks. But it's better than the handful of editors EB or WB had.

"This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It’s that there’s a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders."

This. Best description of Wikipedia I've read so far.