Telemark Skiing Equipment Observation

I don't get it. Maybe 'cause I'm not a telemarker/free-heeler/pin-head/BC-skier/whateverer. Maybe 'cause I don't eat granola or own Birkenstocks. Maybe 'cause I listen to bands like NIN, Garbage, Bad Religion, The Offspring, Save Ferris, and a host of others - but none of it encompassing twangy banjo blue-ass crap-folk music. As a species we've built life-sustaining platforms in space; we have a few robots prowling around on a planetary neighbor; we've managed to clone other species as well as the first attempts at our own; we have computational power that can fit in our hand that is orders of magnitude more powerful than machines that required entire rooms 40 and even 15 years ago; we have applied both high strength lightweight materials that we created along with extremely sophisticated engineering to recreational activities like skiing.

It's that last one. Skiing has it's roots in ancient times. Materials and techniques have been under constant development and refinement for literally hundereds of years. Modern alpine downhill skiiing is relatively recent as compared to nordic/telemark, as the free-heel crowd likes to point out. Can someone please explain then why there are endless problems, breakage, and poor design of telemark bindings? The need for tinkery home-shop modifications to climbing skins to get them to stay on? Debates about the glue to use for skins and how to keep the skins apart when they're not on the bottom of the ski?

Hello? Glue? Glue??!!!?? It's 2004 folks. Is this really the best we can do? What gives? Are all the manufacturers in tele space asleep at the wheel?