Why was British steam so comparatively archaic in design vs others?

I don't think anybody thinks British steam locomotives _look_ bad, for the most part - the express passenger Pacifics of the Big Four are incredible machines in appearance, and obviously they did their jobs well enough... But the engineering of all but the most advanced main line designs seem stuck in the first decade or two of the 1900s.

Even as late as the BR Standards, British locomotives were almost always hand fired, rarely had mechanical lubrication, often had narrow fireboxes that were tweaky about fuel quality, and lacked efficiency improving equipment like feedwater heaters or thermic siphons. The cabs prior to BR standards were oftentimes less than pleasant working environments, often lacking lighting, and being open to the elements.Even the otherwise commonplace piston-operated fire door was a rare sight.

It seems like the only CMEs who meaningfully tried to improve much of this were Bulleid and later Riddles, and even then with varying degrees of success (with other novel and often unsuccessful ideas tacked on, in the case of Bulleid).

So... Why? I get axle loading and loading gauge limiting things like boiler diameter and cylinder size meaningfully vs somewhere like North America where things just got *huge*, but Western continental European axle loading limits are about in line with British limits and much of this was commonplace in France and Germany by the 1930s.