Re: Standards proliferation
Which meant one "normal" and one "small" connector, reversible plugs, and no flimsy tat that breaks or wears out after a few hundred cycles. No weird and crappy A and B types, no mini and micro. What was going through the mind of the designer?
Let's separate these 2 issues.
First, having an A and B type connector. This was quite a sound design approach. The idea was that A's were hosts and B's were devices. Nothing wrong with that, and it stopped people from trying to plug, say, a USB flash drive up to a USB card reader thinking it would just copy files between them. All connections are from a host port to a device port, so all cables should have one A and one B end.
Now, the issue about standard, mini and micro ports is different. Initially, there was only the standard, full sized USB (in A and B). It was decided that these were too big for many devices, so mini USB was born. Then it was decided that even that was too big, so micro was born.
You seem to assume that the entire USB standard, as it exists today, was thought up in one fell swoop. Far from it: The USB standard has evolved over time, and this has entailed some nasty hacks to bring in new features (take USB3, especially micro USB 3). They have done this in an attempt to maintain backwards compatibility, and to keep it "universal".
Type-C is a logical consolidation step. It could probably have been done better, but it's an evolutionary step, as USB advancements have always been.