I think it was an acquired service that they put minimal effort into. Or maybe there was some private agreement to have little hands on
Actually the search engine is really the only original Google property, all the others like Blogger, you Tube, Feedburner, etc were acquired. It's true that they don't put much into it at all and have not even tried to compete with other more popular platforms like Wordpress, but they have made some recent changes to try and catch up: It's still light years behind Wordpress and other self hosted platforms, but for a free platform, it's not bad.