Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
You're assuming a lot of competence on the part of the people who make droids, if anything can be observed from Star Wars it's that droids are fairly routinely annoying, unfit for purpose and exhibit tendencies that contradict their intended function, unless they're one of the extremely expensive ones. Programming in Star Wars isn't good, especially when it comes to droids, and manufacturing flaws are common in the cheap ones.
Droid technology is one of several Star Wars technologies that pre-dates the Republic. Both the Rakata and the Gree had droids. Given the Rakatan obsession with Force-based technologies, something droids explicitly are not, it seems probable that droids were invented by the Gree, stolen by the Rakata, and only later adapted by Humans and other species that developed into the Republic civilization. Being six-limbed cephalopods with an extremely non-Human mental architecture, Gree technology can only ever be imperfectly understood by Human-like minds. As such it is entirely possible that the fundamental basis of droid programming, like the fundamentals of hyperdrive, are only imperfectly understood by even the best minds of the Republic. That would explain a great deal of the variation and inconsistency found in droid programming, it's ultimately cargo-cultist in origin.