No, that hasn't worked fine at all.
Do you realize the amount of judicial interpretation and flip-flopping that has gone on over just the first two amendments?
They're like the poster children for being under-specified.
As a current event, look at the push to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment provision on birthright citizenship. That provision is written quite clearly, but people do not like what it says and as a result we may as a country go through a period where we ignore it.
Nor does it have anything to do with "palatability". When the Bill of Rights was passed, they were never understood to be absolute. The first amendment was never understood to make defamation allowed, nor was the second meant to prohibit towns from preventing people from carrying their guns into taverns. All of this is extremely clear from commentary and practice at the time.
Birthright citizenship is relatively unambiguous, as it is hard to imagine it in conflict with other rights. This is not the case, however, for many other rights.
Conflicts with other rights is a really good point that I missed.
> Birthright citizenship is relatively unambiguous
And yet it is currently a topic of debate. It's entirely possible it gets tossed in the coming years, at least until fashion changes again.
> And yet it is currently a topic of debate.
Its constitutionality and meaning are not under debate. It is quite clear.
There's a debate about repealing it, which would require a new amendment.
But there's no serious debate about the existing amendment's interpretation.
The nuance that you run into is that legal opinion defining what 'subject to the jurisdiction of the US' means (from the 14th amendment) was made in 1898, but at that time the border was relatively open.
Immigration restrictions started amping up exponentially in the 20th century, especially amidst the world wars. It seems unlikely that the court would have ruled as it did in the context of these new laws.