I hope this is not my legacy

I saw a really annoying sentence in a software management book earlier. It read something along the lines of “In all but a few cases, there wasn’t a single delay that was caused by technological factors”. WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE LIKE THIS?

Surely it should just be “few cases were affected by delays due to technical errors”. OK, I concede that there is a modicum of additional information about the distribution of technological delay across cases in the original sentence, but that really wasn’t the point.

When I’m reading text quickly, I’m not neccessarily going to read every single word (which is what I imagine most people do with a book on software management, otherwise God help them), so why make it unneccesarily difficult to decipher with the stupid hyperbole?! (The answer is, I suppose, because the author wants us to buy into their theory)