I see you are wandering into the territory of barefoot shoes! If you want to do more reading around it, the term “barefoot shoe” should send you to the right places. Turns out our feet are actually quite excellent at being feet, and all we really need is some protection from sharp stuff + insulation +/- weatherproofing, and we’re good.
If you enjoy wide toebox shoes, you might even like zero drop shoes; I know that all my knee pains and sprained ankles disappeared like magic once I switched to feet-shaped, zero-drop, thin sole shoes. Sure, it was a bit uncomfortable walking “barefoot” at first, but my sole and foot/ankle/calf muscles adapted within a week or so. Never looking back!
Also worth mentioning that I try actually walking barefoot (as in unshod, not in barefoot shoes) as often as possible, and did so before switching to barefoot shoes, so ymmv.
I think this could be partially explained by Joseph Henrich’s “The Secret of Our Success”; he explains that a large chunk of our knowledge is not understanding-based, but rather culture-based, with optimisation for copying, conformity, and tradition-following in the absence of understanding of why something is done.
Examples in hunter-gatherer tribes include:
Bow-making. They know which branches and vines to use for the bow, and which arrows and tips work best, but not why, and there is no experimentation with other materials.
Poison use. E.g., arrow-tip, fish-killers, etc. They have complex preparation steps, but aren’t sure why they do it.
Food taboos/Detoxifying food. They know what to do, but don’t know why it works or which steps are extraneous; they do it “because this is how it has always been done”.
Mostly, humans developed a process or area of knowledge based on necessity, then effectively found a local minimum that achieved their base requirements, and rarely—if ever—explored beyond this scope due to the low perceived likelihood of benefit vs cost of breaking tradition and effort. Any improvements where coincidental to the materials they used when exposed to unfamiliar environments and requirements, and those rare instances of exploration of approach or technique.
Basically, we are actually superbly adapted to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and any improvements beyond that have to occur against the resistance of breaking tradition and failing many times before succeeding. There is a theory that becoming agriculturalists gave us stable food supplies/security and the ability to grow our populations to the point where greater specialisation was more feasible, thus allowing for more experimentation and the transfer of knowledge from experimenting master to student.