There are some terrible middleware implementations out there. I remember hearing about some early attempts from DirecTV at building a DVR. They were encoding everything in xml and sending it through IPC spaghetti. IME, the level of talent in the consumer electronics space is much less than, say, a big N company. You have a lot of EE turned sw guy types, or java-trained CS grads who don't understand performance. Now that the industry is slowly dying, it's losing even more talent.