Pneumatic press, nail gun, screwdriver, impact wrench, seems like these could work, while maybe not a direct dirivative. Some things persist, and are stable as others have noted. A cool thing about innovation is that the ideas are often things people didn't know they wanted until they see it.
These are not improvements of a hammer design, but completely different things. Screws do not play well with deformation, but let’s ignore that: you’ll probably have both a hammer and one of these things in your toolbox, and you’ll miss a hammer if it’s not there. It is a general-purpose hit-force tool for hitting anything, not only nails. A better design for a hammer itself could include a claw or new hitting surface geometry, handle amortizer and so on, which are successfully done in variety, despite gp thinks that it’s “stuck”. First, it’s not, we just waited for better materials, advanced tasks, etc. Second, it is not much to do with hitting something with inertia-accumulated force.
Anyway my point is that if you change all hammers in the world overnight (like software does) you better have done a good job of century-testing your changes in all situations. If your reasoning is just “it gets old”, well, this site’s rules do not allow me to express what I think of that.
