Some higher up (Gen or project manager) has a great consulting job lined up after retirement and he'll use all his power to get something in the inventory.
The saddest thing thing is this is oh so true. A lot of people in the areas that make these decisions are one foot into retirement already, something to walk into on the dark side tends to override a lot of ethos and values.
Also you have guys with straight prejudices towards certain things. I know one WO who fought like a fat chick over a donut against anything with Velcro on it. His reasoning "it's noisy" the suggestion that so was shooting at someone didn't quite make it through his thick skull.
Multicam is great but I think two things will kill it:
1. SOF is using it and when regular joes start asking for it, it gets fobbed off as "they just want to be like SOF" by those that "know"
2. Multicam was the hands down better cam, UCP came out of nowhere and surprised a hell of a lot of people, hence why there was lot of MC products available and very few UCP. To bring it back in now would require a hell of a lot of high ranking people to say they were wrong.
I'm not in the US Army so I can only base this of information I have from guys that are but for the Army to hold their hat in their hand and tell the Marines they have the better cam, can we use it? would be only slightly over shadowed by the blizzard raging in the fiery pits of hell. IIRC the "universal camouflage" was brought in to save money. Correct me if I get it wrong but BDUs were covered by clothing allowance? but DCUs had to be purchased with unit funds.
For years there has been papers put forward that a bunch of Senior Es should be made Subject Matter Experts and sent to Natrick. To the best of my knowledge this hasn't happened. If it happened it would be great and might provide some QC over certain BS but they would have to not all be yes men who built themselves into a clique. All they need to do is say, it needs to do this, weigh this and be able to be used like this and then critique the prototypes.
Damn that was long.