Even if there was a real benefit from optimizing firmware and saving a few cents with cheap washers for drives in a low vibration environment there is a much more certain cost in that you have to qualify the firmware, risk introducing errors, etc. I can imagine that Best Buy might have been able to stock one model of high capacity HDD but no way were they going to stock more colors of WD drive than there are on the rainbow flag. That lack of product sense locked manufacturers out of the retail market.
(Makes me think of the cringe monthly hard drive roundup in Anandtech where an enterprise drive produced in huge numbers in a single SKU would usually be $80-100 cheaper than prosumer drives that, according to the spec sheet, consumed about 0.5W less and were about 3db quieter… And I have plenty of those enterprise drives still spinning after all these years, the only time I think about the noise is when the machine boots and the drives emit a throaty chirp that makes me think of a Ferrari spooling up.)