It concluded because, despite everyone agreeing they wanted a unicorn, they couldn’t agree which breed of unicorn they wanted, and thus were unable to get one.

Which is to say: things went wrong in circles because different folks had different problems, those different problems had incompatible requirements, and so things spun in circles for a number of years as every idea failed to solve the problem for everyone simultaneously, while narrowly-specified solutions were shot down for not solving enough problems.