I suspect at this point it's mostly inertia acting functionally like a cabal. There was a time when the best way to get a quote would have been to talk to an agent who would then do COMPLICATED MATH you could not comprehend and return a number to you. This is no longer the case, but apparently no one thought it would be profitable or worthwhile to go all-transparent or make insurers' methods and rates public. So we keep doing it the old way.

That's why I suspect the consumer side is the place to fix this. We have the means to acquire and publish the data, but it requires a certain level of time investment and coordination.