Or did they do it to us on purpose? I always figured that tastelessness in modern tomatoes was an unintended consequence of the desire to make them firmer and easier to transport. It's true that the worthless flavor and texture of just about all supermarket tomatoes is an unintended consequence, but not of the desire to make them as tough as tennis balls. It was a side-effect of something far more useless: a gene that makes the tomatoes turn uniformly red when ripe, instead of leaving unsightly patches of green. So now they're purty, but not worth the trouble of chewing. The linked article claims that researchers think they figured out to turn the flavor gene back on, but regulations forbade them actually to taste a research product, so they're not sure, and anyway they'd be crazy to try to market an evil GM tomato, right?
Heirloom tomatoes have escaped this fate, so it's still possible to grow a decent tomato at home. At least, I assume it's possible for some of you. We have terrible luck with tomatoes here, perhaps because we don't use pesticides, but perhaps even more because our climate tends to go from "too cold to bloom" to "too hot to set fruit" in the space of about a week every spring. It makes me want to build an air-conditioned greenhouse, because a good tomato is the crown of creation.