Hmmm. What the author fails to acknowledge is the 'bakelite' phenomenon. When bakelite was first used all those years back, it's sales tanked because it looked like the proto-plastic it was. It wasn't until it was made to look like wood that it became accepted, then the consumers of it were taken on a journey back to the original aesthetic. Put simply, sometimes people aren't ready to accept the intrinsic properties of a thing unless they've been led along a path towards it.