You can blame the gullible idiots who are convinced that more pixels is better, have no idea of esoteric concepts such as "noise" or "dynamic range", and will rush out to buy anything with a higher pixel count, dooming any compact camera with fewer, decent-sized pixels to certain death in the marketplace. Though you'd think that there'd be enough people with a clue and a demand for a high-quality pocket-sized camera with the right compromises made in its design parameters to give the best (as opposed to biggest) images you can expect from that size, for Canon (or someone) to bother making such a line.
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They need a way to summarize the quality of a camera with one number. A quantifiable measure of picture quality. Analogous to how the Transaction Processing Council measures server speeds, so you don't have to decide by engineering specs like "Megaherz". Would a comparison of the photo against the original scene work? Does quality = similarity to reality?