Andrew, I think you're not taking into account the fact that people need cameras. That is, they will buy them even if they're not particularly good, because they need the machine. To argue that the camera company people are actually wizards whose massive market research produces the best possible overall outcome is simply wrong -- major companies screw up all the time, and persist in their problems, even when EVERYBODY knows that it's wrong. And they still, as you put it, manage to shift a lot of whatever they're selling, because people need them...until something better comes along. Ask the once-dominant cell-phone makers Blackberry and Nokia about that.
One camera company after another has come up with menu systems that drive photographers nuts -- because it's one thing to look at a menu system on your computer screen as you're programming it, and another thing to look at it on a tiny LCD in a snowstorm. People bought them anyway, and suffered with them, because they needed the cameras. To use a non-camera example of the same thing, BMW had a control system called iDrive, and I had it in a $70,000 7-series automobile. I never did completely figure it out. BMW kept it for years, in the face of massive and universal criticism by almost everybody outside the company, and, no doubt, quite a few inside. They kept dinking around with it, pretending it only needed a couple of touches to fix, but they were wrong. In fact, what iDrive required from the customer was a long initial study (this to turn on the heat) followed by refreshers every week or so. It was an engineering marvel and a consumer nightmare. Eventually, they mostly gave up -- it simply wasn't a suitable system to their cars, and almost everybody knew it about 20 minutes after the first car was released. But the company didn't. People bought BMWs anyway because they wanted the style and performance, which didn't mean that iDrive was a good idea -- and they might have sold more cars if they didn't have iDrives. I myself have shifted to a competitor company, and have never gone back to BMW.
What Michael *didn't* emphasize enough (IMHO) is that this situation tends to be self-correcting, as in the case of Blackberry and Nokia; and some of these camera companies are going to find that out, if they're not careful.