Progress v6: is the age of standards the worst enemy of Progress?

[This is my sixth article on Progress. I'm sorry for the long period of silence on that matter, the real life had caught up with me, but there is also good news: this is not, as planned, the last article on progress. There is at least one more, or more likely, two more, to come.]

In the previous five articles I made the impression, that contrary to the public opinion, to achieve actual progress, older is better. And in the cases I mentioned, it is. But let's look at an extreme example of this, the by now fairly well known story that "space shuttle engine's width is two horse asses plus X".

While the latest conclusion is, that, indeed, this is an urban legend, and the space shuttle might not have any relation to a horse's ass whatsoever, the basic story (bar the newer, Usenet-based addition with the space shuttle), that the width of the railroad track is based on the dimensions of two horse rears, same as the chariot width in the old Rome is affirmed in the same article:

[...]the dimension common to both was that of a cart axle pulled by two horses in harness (about 1.4m or 4ft 8in). This determined both the Roman gauge and Stephenson's, which derived from the horsedrawn wagon ways of South Northumberland and County Durham coalfields.[...]
[from: Crow, James. Housesteads. London: B.T. Batsford, 1995. ISBN 0-7134-6085-7 (pp. 33-34).]

The same article also says:

At the time of the Civil War, even though nearly all of the Confederacy's railroad equipment had come from the North or from Britain (of the 470 locomotives built in the U.S. in 1860, for example, only 19 were manufactured in the South), 113 different railroad companies in the Confederacy operated on three different gauges of track. This lack of standardization was, as historian James McPherson points out, one of the many reasons the Union was able to finally vanquish the Confederacy militarily:

The Confederate government was never able to coax the fragmented, run-down, multi-gauged network of southern railroads into the same degree of efficiency exhibited by northern roads. This contrast illustrated another dimension of Union logistical superiority that helped the North eventually to prevail.
[from: McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. ISBN 0-19-503863-0 (pp. 318-319, 514-515)]

So what does this tell us? First of all, that the conclusion that

In other words, there was nothing inevitable about a railroad gauge supposedly traceable to the size of wheel ruts in Imperial Rome. Had the Civil War taken a different course, the eventual standard railroad gauge used throughout North America might well have been different than the current one.

is both somewhat true,... and, to a degree, a circular argument: "The war was won partly because of the railroad gauge, but had the war taken a different course, the railroad gauge would have been different." (If the outcome of the war wouldn't have depended on the railroad gauge, that is?)

The second, and most important, conclusion is, in a collaborative environment, it is better to use well-established standards then not to use them: having a standard-sized railroad might have helped the South to win the war, by allowing the trains to pass through an unified railroad system instead of having to unload and re-load trains (or change the gauge on the wagons, as they do it when trains transit from e.g. Russia into western Europe and vice-versa).

And in modern times, there is even more to say for keeping of the standard: even though the width of the railroad track might not be entirely optimal for modern trains, there is an enormous amount of existing equipment based on the standard, which would ALL have to be changed if somebody decided to switch standards.

Or in other words, there is no reason not to use a standard just because it is 2000 years old, but there is a lot of reason to re-use existing equipment. And it doesn't preclude us in the least from making progress, (for example, in this particular case, from developing high-speed trains like ICE3 and TGV)

Which, incidentally, is what I have been saying for the last five articles. So no, the age of standards doesn't impede progress to any significant degree, if the standards make sense. This is an important distinction. The history of science would be much more straightforward if it wasn't. How so?... Come back next week(or next month?), and see for yourself, in... Progress wars! ;-)