Many recent standards have been mechanically horrid; SATA and HDMI both lack positive retention. With HDMI this might be considered a feature in an environment where the cord is likely to be pulled but I prefer that it not fall out of the back of my computer, which has happened several times.
You're right about HDMI, but SATA is fine - not only are locking cables readily available, it was designed as a backplane interface. Everyone is simply using it wrong.
That is right; SATA connectors were designed for a backplane interface which did not require positive retention, so it was not included. But they adopted it for other applications for which it was not designed properly.
If there was not a problem, then why did they add the retention clip later? See below.
SATA is a standard for a connector overwhelmingly (99.9+% I'd estimate) used inside of an enclosure. How much positive retention does it need?
The majority is not always right, or even sane, unless you are a Puppeteer. Obscure?
(Secondarily, I have SATA cables with a spring-retention lock that works pretty well and works across a wide variety of motherboards and drives, so I wonder if it is actually part of the standard and is merely optional.)
The spring retention mechanism was added later after it was realized that the design was flawed. None of the oldest products which used SATA supported it, and I have some old motherboards and a pair of drives to demonstrate it.
Perhaps if you had failure rate data to support your opinion. I have only had minor problems with SATA cables, and those minor problems were difficulty in disconnecting. Retention was too good. Never had a data failure or cable failure. Even though I use a mix of cables provided by mother board suppliers, disk suppliers and the cheapest ones I can find for sale. But it is a small sample, and only covers about a decade.
For a given operating time, I have had way more SATA connectors separate than IDC connectors. With IDC connectors you have to struggle to separate them without damaging the cable.