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No surprise when you consider that silicon was known not to be the best possible choice as a solid-state semiconductor, starting before its rise to commercial prominence.
Silicon simply had the advantage of a head start because large quantities of low-cost raw material had become a consistent bulk commodity in the supply chain for steel mills (over a few generations), and theoretically would be a feasible source for the highly purified elemental silicon, which had been proven viable at the time to be workable for electronic use.
This was an emergency.
It was a space race.
And a cold war.
It is expected many times when very high purity materials need to be produced, that large quantities of lesser-purity feedstock need to be processed in order to "extract" a relatively minuscule quantity of the "absolute" pure substance.
The processing and handling can be quite costly, but it makes a huge difference when the large quantity of "leftover waste" raw material retains its value as a commodity afterward. Kind of like having a factory where tonnes of commodity come in, almost the same number of tonnes of equivalent commodity come out, and the prized product is only a relatively few kilos which has been carefully removed.
So in this type situation the net raw material cost of the specialty product becomes one of the least significant factors, and is virtually decoupled from the price or fluctuations of the bulk commodity itself.
It's just that germanium had made it first to the table commercially, and silicon performed better at so many things that we stayed at second generation ever since except for a few ambitious outliers. Like these.
Unforseen performance has been anticipated by some of us for a long time.