But that's the thing: because the market spoke once a decade ago, does that mean there's no room for revisiting that discussion? Tastes change, technology changes, the economy changes, people change, everything changes.

It's much like the current 4k TV market. Once upon a time, The Market™ spoke in favor of putting "smart" functionality in TVs, and so manufacturers added computers with greater and greater complexity and visual pizazz and apps and such.

Then, the Chromecast and Roku and Fire TV and such became popular, and - better yet - ended up being much easier to upgrade as technology marched on (you only have to replace a $35-or-so dongle or box instead of having to replace a whole multi-hundred-or-thousand-dollar TV). On top of that, the cable companies started to dip their toes in offering these "smart" features in their own set top boxes, as did Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony with their gaming consoles, and there were and still are zero TVs able to replace either category of device. So now you have a bunch of TVs with smart features that go entirely unused (or, worse, actually break, taking the TV with it) because other devices offer better versions of those features and can actually be upgraded without replacing the entire TV.

Unfortunately, since The Market™ has already spoken, there is now to my knowledge exactly one 4k TV manufacturer that offers consumer-grade TVs without smart features (Sceptre), and certainly not on store shelves (I had to buy mine on Amazon, with all the risk of damage and theft that entails, and the only Prime-eligible one was the 50"). Literally every other 4k TV - including any at a brick-and-mortar store, be it Best Buy or Fry's or Wal-Mart or what have you - has smart features that cannot be removed and that are either 1) already outperformed by $20-100 devices on those same exact shelves or 2) going to be outperformed within a year because technology marches on and no TV offers a way to upgrade the computational hardware.