Why do wedding cakes usually suck?

I've probably had a good slice of wedding cake, but I can't recall it. My wife and I went to some length to make sure ours was better than average - we ordered carrot cake w/ cream cheese icing, figuring that we'd have better odds if we could avoid entirely the words "butter cream" and "genoise" - but, in the event, it was disappointing. Don't take this personally,but in all likelihood, your wedding cake sucked, too.

But why? I'm about to spend all day on an airplane in order to attend a wedding, so I have vested interest in the answer. On the face of it, the problem is not a budget constraint: We Americans spend, by most counts, between $3 and $5 per slice on our wedding cakes. A slice of cake from a quality baker generally costs a bit more than that, but I've had plenty of very good slices of cake for that sort of price, and that is by the slice. Clearly there are economies of scale to cakes: The cost of the ingredients may be roughly proportional to the number of servings, and perhaps even declining, because you use less frosting per unit of cake as the cake gets larger (butter costs more than flour, and ratio of surface area to volume should fall with size); and the larger input, labor, should clearly exhibit increasing returns to scale (it takes no more time to bake 2 layers than 1).

So if we spend enough to get a good cake, why do so often fail to do so?
My pet hypothesis is that two factors come into play. First, the cake supplier is often secured in some "captive" fashion: Many spaces (this was true of our wedding) insist that you use their florist, their baker, whatever, with predictable results. The incentive conflict is clear. Second, we, the consumer, have exhibited a preference for visual aesthetics at the expense of taste, and it is hard to make a big cake look good. Ergo, the money that should have gone into better baking skills gets reallocated into fancier decorations. And, to be fair, it takes a lot of time and effort to make a cook look pretty. I'm not saying this is a bad thing: It may be perfectly rational to exchange the taste of a great cake for the images we fantasize about.

But I am saying that it comes at a cost.