OK, but we spent a decade having to worry about this garbage, until the tooling finally caught up. You always had to keep it in the back of your mind if you wrote PC software. Even if you just ran PCs, you had to worry about the compatibility between your OS, your "DOS extender", and your programs.
There were literally millions of man-hours wasted on segment registers. A kludge that helped Intel conquer the world, but what a filthy, disgusting architecture, and what a waste of everybody's time and brain power.
> OK, but we spent a decade having to worry about this garbage, until the tooling finally caught up.
This was less about tooling than it was about economics - there was 32-bit hardware available in the personal computer space in 1984, if not before. The issue was cost. In today's currency, a 32-bit capable Mac was $8,000 with 128K. The first 32-bit capable PC was closer to $20,000.
That's a heavy lift in a world where a segmented architecture machine costs a fraction of that amount, runs software you might already have, and works the same way as your co-worker's machine.
> There were literally millions of man-hours wasted on segment registers.
A software developer in 1986 was not forced to deal with segment registers... but they often chose to deal with them to gain access a (much) bigger audience of potential customers for their software.
> A kludge that helped Intel conquer the world, but what a filthy, disgusting architecture, and what a waste of everybody's time and brain power.
The other side of the coin is that (for reasons I state above), segmented architectures got more capable software into more hands more quickly. It arguably did a lot for end users.