See also "the SNAFU principle" which posits that centralized data processing cannot receive the data it would actually need to function effectively because of the noise introduced by the various necessary disintermediation and translation interface layers.

A hardware analogy: we have Gbit Ethernet common and cheap now. how hard would it be for a CPU to bit bang signals like that onto a wire? we have the layers of translators and information losses through them: the hardware connected to the Ethernet plug knows things about the cable characteristics, electrical performance of the link, etc that we hardly ever want. but a real "top down" view of traffic performance in order to make a "ETA" dialog on a file transfer Accurate might require that much data and more. So we make do with estimates, then decide that the estimates are too much trouble and just write an animation to a timer.