Ask Slashdot: Why Do Hugely Popular Websites Have Ultra-Basic UI Navigation?

dryriver writes: You follow a news story on CNN or BBC or FoxNews or Reuters. The frontpage of the news site changes so frequently that you wish there was a "News Timeline" UI element at the top of the page, letting you scrub back and forward in time (by hours, days, weeks, years) so you can see previous states of the frontpage and get a better sense of how the story developed over time. How many major news websites have this scrubbable Timeline UI element? Currently none do. Or you go on Youtube. Hundreds of millions of videos for you to browse. Except that there is only 3 basic UI elements you can use — keyword search, automated recommendations panel on the right, or a sortable list of a specific channel's uploaded videos. There is no visual network or node-diagram UI that would let you browse videos by association. There is no browsing by category (e.g. sports > soccer > amateurs > kids ) or by alphabetic order. There is no master index or master list of videos — like a phonebook — that you can call up to find videos you haven't come across yet. And yet these UI elements are not very difficult to put in the user's hands at all. Why do websites with tens of millions of daily visitors and massive web development resources do so little to allow more sophisticated browsing for those users who desire it? Is there a cogent reason to restrict website navigation to "simple, limited and dumb", or do these websites simply not care enough or bother enough to put more sophisticated UIs into place?