David, you'll find the same sort of absurdities in the Contax world: but that is far smaller and therefore far less visible than the Leica world is. In their pursuit of perfection, Zeiss made some wonderfully innovative and logically sound designs. The execution of those designs, however, suffered on account of their complexity. Leitz strove for ingenuity coupled with simplicity, which made their products close to indestructible and considerably easier to service. Then, while Leitz could continue their work uninterrupted after WW2, Zeiss were split between eastern and western zones. Production of somewhat simplified Contaxes was resumed in the western zone, but greater attention was given to SLRs. The Contaflex was a sort of dead end, while the Contarex was at once a curious mixture of the future and the dinosaur. In the field of optics, though, Zeiss were ahead so long as they held the patents for hard coating. After WW2, coating technologies were made available to the Japanese, for example, but remained under patent protection in W. Germany. Thus you find Zeiss lenses less prone to flare and capable of much greater contrast than Leitz ones, which, however, were superior in terms of resolving power. The soft glass and soft coatings (dripped, I believe) of Leitz were also easy to destroy. It should not surprise us that Nikon optics, which first imitated and then improved upon those of Zeiss, became so popular with press photographers: newspapers could (and can) reproduce only "punch", not detail and fine gradations.
Zeiss too were practitioners of printed and real absurdity in the 1930s. To beat their fastest shutter speed of 1/500 sec., Leitz came up with 1/1000 sec.; and then Zeiss hit back with 1/1250 sec. Both will have known that mechanical shutters routinely showed, at speeds or [EDIT = of] that order, errors of 25 per cent or more.
The Contax, then, did not survive because it was not quite so fit. Wonder which camera Darwin used.
