Writing performant code is hard. It requires a solid grasp of concepts like threading, asynchronous event handling, caching, and asymptotic complexity. Judging by the groups of programmers I've worked with, around 20-40% of any given group doesn't understand those concepts well enough to incorporate performance considerations as a matter of course into their daily work.

However, those programmers are obviously still useful to the company, but they get assigned to tasks not considered performance critical, so you end up with a blu ray player that can play Netflix streams flawlessly without dropping any frames, but it takes 30-60 seconds to open the menu item that displays your queue.

Unless you're some hotshot software company that can afford to fire 20% of your staff and replace them with more experienced (and more expensive) developers, the only real way to fix it is developer training and filing bug reports. I don't know how it is at other companies, but here if we developers see a performance issue that we don't have time or business priority to fix, we're fully entitled to file our own bug report on it. It might take a couple of releases to work its way to the top of the backlog, but they usually do get addressed eventually.