There's a lot of truth behind this, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
The reason it was "way down the list of real world priorities" is because it was perceived as an impossible requirement to meet in terms of effort. My hopes is that it would be met as an innocuous side effect of making the thing work in a mobile and desktop viewport, but for the reasons I speculated above, it wasn't, and hence got dropped down on the list to the point where it wasn't worth the battle needed to ship a truly responsive design.
I can't just blame individuals though -- its easy to say, "oh, well they just weren't smart or motivated enough", but that's not the case. In the end I'm left thinking that the tooling, documentation, and ecosystem surrounding it simply didn't support making this "an easy requirement".
The reason it was "way down the list of real world priorities" is because it was perceived as an impossible requirement to meet in terms of effort. My hopes is that it would be met as an innocuous side effect of making the thing work in a mobile and desktop viewport, but for the reasons I speculated above, it wasn't, and hence got dropped down on the list to the point where it wasn't worth the battle needed to ship a truly responsive design.
I can't just blame individuals though -- its easy to say, "oh, well they just weren't smart or motivated enough", but that's not the case. In the end I'm left thinking that the tooling, documentation, and ecosystem surrounding it simply didn't support making this "an easy requirement".