Your sarcasm aside, availability or lack thereof, doesn't mean one design is not superior to another. You have missed the point entirely. I wouldn't say that canisters are better than white gas as a blanket statement, but the Coleman stove was a good alternative canister for cold weather. A white gas stove is useless in many parts of the world where only kerosene is available. Your assumptiont that white gas is available everywhere is just plain wrong.

There are plenty of examples of superior technology that failed in the marketplace. Betamax was a superior product to the VHS, for example. The car was not a superior product to a horse drawn buggy until there was sufficient infrastructure in place to support it.

I would be interested in knowing the history of this stove and why the canister design was not licensed to other manufacturers. I would bet that when the first canister stove was sold, it had the same problem-lack of availability of canisters. The same is true of hydrogen cars-lack of infrastructure to refuel them.