
After a while, someone realized, hey, we can probably make up the vast decrease in water pressure by engineering a better-built, better-designed toilet. Sure enough, even a fairly simple change is able to get most of the effectiveness of the old five-gallon monsters. And more advanced toilets like assisted-flush ones are far more effective, and clog less, while still using a fraction of the water.
But by then, so many people had convinced themselves that "low-flow toilets are awful" that there's no recapturing that bad first impression. There's still a black market in old-style toilets -- people actually pay more for them, in some cases, than they would have to pay for an assisted-flush toilet that works better. More often, though, people just buy the cheapest toilet (i.e., one engineered precisely as they were done in the 1950s), like my office just did; then complain that it doesn't work well, and place the blame not on their choice of toilet but on the environmental movement.
So often when technology advances, people carry a grudge about the first not-very-good implementation long past when the problems in it have been resolved. I think the one thing that sets neophiles apart from neo-Luddites is that neophiles look at a bleeding-edge technology and see what it could become; neo-Luddites only see what it isn't, today.
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