Interesting, i've never looked too much into the credit card universe.
What i know is that almost 50 (times flies, i originaly wrote 40...) years ago, my uncle worked a bit with secure terminals at a French company (forgot the name, but i know he lived in Spain for a while), then was yanked by a company that worked with American Express, took the Paris-NY Concord at least a hundred time to try to implement the same stuff he did in Europe in the US (chip + PIN), was distraught because the issue weren't technical and somehow transformed from engineer to executive, and ended up being an auditor for money laundering and fraud detection in major banks (received death threats and had bodyguards for a while).
Don't know if it is related, but the first time i went in the US i remembered some stories he told me about this American Express job and said to myself "Yeah, that checks out".
Yes, there is no reason to believe that the chip+pin is a technical issue, it's mostly business / political with lot of (financial) interests under.
Often policies like that are decided because of lobbying:
some people found large niches on how to make money, and they try to convince others to not change their habits even if the new system would benefit the masses (like the situation with the imperial system).
What i know is that almost 50 (times flies, i originaly wrote 40...) years ago, my uncle worked a bit with secure terminals at a French company (forgot the name, but i know he lived in Spain for a while), then was yanked by a company that worked with American Express, took the Paris-NY Concord at least a hundred time to try to implement the same stuff he did in Europe in the US (chip + PIN), was distraught because the issue weren't technical and somehow transformed from engineer to executive, and ended up being an auditor for money laundering and fraud detection in major banks (received death threats and had bodyguards for a while).
Don't know if it is related, but the first time i went in the US i remembered some stories he told me about this American Express job and said to myself "Yeah, that checks out".