Lights, speaker, power and reset buttons, action!

As I take a short break from digging around in the belly of a generic personal computer with parts sourced from numerous different manufacturers, many of which likely don't speak the same language, and I marvel at how the whole thing manages to work at all, my attention is drawn, much like it would be to a three foot metal spike sticking out of my leg, to the front panel connectors.

You know, those little two-conductor plugs for the power & hard disk access lights, and indeed the power, reset, flying monkey launcher, chassis intrusion detector and suspend switches, that straddle pins on the mainboard like a floozy after too much G&T at a speakeasy.

WHY, oh why isn't there a single unified standard to connect all of these things?
Not only is it the most immensely fiddly part of building a computer from parts, but what seems to be 80% of the time, the connectors you actually have on the case don't fit the mainboard's pins, they have a three astride plug with the conductive business ends either end, and nothing in the middle, whereas your pins are all cozied up next to each other, or even worse, you have a separate single pin plug for each pin of relevance, so you've got to sit reading the manual for four hours to work out exactly which pin is which AND you have to decipher the weird symbol that looks like nothing you've ever seen before on each and every cable in order to get everything plugged in.

And then, when you go to turn the machine on for the first time, you still get attacked by a flying monkey. So much for documentation eh?

So, can anyone come up with a valid reason to not have a standard connector for this nonsense? besides keeping the guy that operates the randomly shaped and labeled connector making machine in employment? anyone?


Anyone at all?