A return to fixed 50mm (or 35mm) lenses as kit lenses?

Zooms aren't just better than they were in 1980, they're also a lot cheaper to make. Zooms are more complicated than primes and have more glass elements. As far as I know, they had to grind all the optical glass elements those days individually. Nowadays seems to me they're often moulded and glued into plastic.

I'm sure a fixed focal length kit would be a hard sell to the public. By now primes have become for specialist situations. In fact a lot of the camera buying plebs soon latch on to the idea of an 18-200 being a perfect lens, just look at all the questions we get on them.