This is basically the price you pay for the flexibility that EAV brings.

And developers love EAV because its seems like a dream during the Design and initial Development phases, especially compared to the apparent unreasonable strictures and inflexibility of SQL and Relational Data Design. Plus EAV intuitively maps better to the OAV concepts implicit in Object-Orientation.

Of course they don't understand the maintenance and administration issues that come along with it. Nor even the massive effort overhead of actually doing the development correctly, that doesn't become apparent until Version 2 (or late in the V1 development, if they've got good testing and acceptance procedures).