Who to blame for the "add an egg" problem

I already posted one blurb from the New York Times article Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, but here's another that struck me as worth noting:

... Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their "moral obligation to cook," something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the "baker" to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.

I was always wondering why you could buy powdered eggs, but if you ever bought a cake mix it always would require adding an egg. Apparently it's marketing that's to blame. Once you've gone through the hassle of throwing in an egg, you might as well forgo the cake mix and just whip up a cake from scratch - after all eggs have a shorter shelf life than a bunch of the other components that go it.