It is possible you may have invented a more efficient way to tie the shoes, but you still spent time and effort doing that. What more, you never question why it should be laces, or shoes for that matter. Waering mocasins is a tradition, wearing bear hide mocasins is a ritual. Were you to try to make your mocasins out of say sheep hide (like a monkey would since a sheep-hide mocasins will seemingly accomplish the same task, namely cover and protect your feet, w/out the risks of killing a bear), very soon you will discover that they dont last as long as bear-hide mocasins. By that time you will have expended your resources on those no good mocasins and will have to go out and get bear-hide for extra effort. Repeat this over generations and savings/waste become enormous. We do try to improve what is out there (comparative advantage) but we also perfectly copy what has been improved for us by others. And that dont stop w/age

The more I think of it though, I think there is a lot of truth to what you are saying.  In our (the one I belong to) culture, three meals a day is tradition and we do it.  In fact our day revolves very much around this schedule.  I'm sure there are better ways to break up your meals but we follow what we grew up with.  When you think about it, very few people actually come up with new ways of doing things.  Trends occur when someone comes up with a new way of doing things and people follow.  If everyone questioned the efficiency of everything we'd never get anything done.  It would be like in Civ if we put all our citizens to be scientists.  You wouldn't get very far.

So is the beauty of the human brain that we are (generally) open to hearing new ideas at a young age and trying them out?  Then as we get older, we find what we are comfortable with and stick with it and get to work?  You have a small percentage of "inventors" and the rest of us are "triers/followers?"  In your example, you'd have a guy in your tribe who would try out various moccasins until he found the best one.  Only one guy lost efficiency in order to make general efficiency better.  In tribal communities it's probably not very practical to do this so this is probably why it took so long for humans to make that first leap into civilization...?

BTW, I think this should be moved into the Worldly Chatter Forum.  Doesn't seem very controversial and a lot more members who avoid P&R may be interested.