why has no one truly solved male pattern baldness (particularly as the commercial incentives must be huge)
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So making drugs for conditions like this is harder but not in the way you think. Baldness is an esthetic issue, not a health issue. That being the case any treatment you make cannot have any major side effects that adversely affect health. In a nutshell it has to be really really safe to stand a chance of getting FDA approval. This makes it much more difficult to make treatments.
Compare that to cancer for example. Cancer in most cases will kill you, you are already going to die. So using a really toxic drug that may adversely affect your health, yet successfully keep you alive, is an acceptable trade off, in that scenario. An equally toxic drug that prevents baldness would never in a million years be approved. The balding patient is not dying, he is not even sick, so that drug better not make him sick in the process of treatment. Lot harder to do.
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