After all, when was the last time you read a book and though "Wow, the page layout in this book *rocks*?".

I've thought the opposite. The Circuit Problems Book Which Shall Not Be Named looked like someone just vomited a bunch of text and figures into MSWord. It was appallingly awful.

So what you do is type in Word and then copy/paste it into LaTeX for the formating and everything else.

Are you insane or trolling? All reasonable text editors have spell checkers.

MSWord is not the answer. Ever.

Would the error have been caught with a more alert programmer? Would the error have been caught with a more thorough code review? Would the error have been caught with consistent units in the project?

Programming is an exercise in managing complexity. Anything which increases the system's complexity for no good reason is a Bad Idea. English units are one of those things.

So, you can blame the person, or you can recognize that humans have a finite capacity to understand complex systems. The former approach requires you to find a group of "Heroes" to develop your software. Or if you recognize that many problems are the result of your system and you eliminate needless complexity, your group of competent programmers can do the job, and any heroes you manage to find can do something really cool.

its only the soulless who think ... that all measurements should be in a base ten

No, its anybody who ever had to do an engineering or physics calculation, ever. You can take your bullshit English/Imperial system and go dance in the trees or whatever your trying to get at there.

Remember folks, English Units Crash Rockets.

I have always believed that the vast majority of today's programming languages have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of programmers and consultants.

For example, lots of people use Fortran, C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, or C#. I see absolutely no reason why a single language could not offer all those features. The only reason you "need" all that is because the programmers created all these funny quirks so that they could introduce more and more products and services. This is done so they can charge you more for each of those things, and also to differentiate them from their competitors.

Seriously though...

Different accounts offer different features. You could try to make do with a single deposit account instead of a checkings/savings/CC combo, but probably wouldn't get as much return as you do with specialized products. Loans are totally different from deposit accounts, though, so I don't know how you'd plan to combine them. Also, a lot of the complexity here comes from dealing with Congress's regulations. Since everybody seems to think we don't have enough of those now, that's probably not going to get simpler anytime soon.

I personally voted for fungus because I'm guessing those are by and large the most treatable diseases

Not really. Fungi are actually a lot closer to animals than bacteria, so it's much harder to create a drug that kills the disease without killing you.