Tin Fiddles

In his marvelous book, The Supper of the Lamb , Robert Farrar Capon has a riff on "the Tin Fiddle." Capon uses the term to refer to equipment foisted upon the non professional public that a professional cook would never accept. (He's particualrly bitter about bread knives.) In our family, "tin fiddle" has come to mean cooking gadgets that complicate a cook's life (and clutter the cupboards) rather than simplify it. I love gadgets, but some things are just ridiculous. Reading the latest Williams-Sonoma, after wading through the 10 different items I need to be able to cook an egg, I came across the tin fiddle to beat all tin fiddles: the scone pan. Like stout Cortez, I was silent, albeit in a kitchen in Virginia, dumbfounded by this apparation. It is so pointless. Rolling out scone dough and slashing it into triangles with a knife is easy, the work of a minute. Stuffing the fiddling little compartments of the scone pan with dough would take 4 times as long. What's the reason for this waste of metal?