Failure to preserve: Why does this keep happening?

Occasionally, but too often, a perfectly good Confrontation Clause objection is held unreviewable and lost because defense counsel fails to preserve it, usually by objecting but only on hearsay grounds.  A frustratingly good example is presented by a decision issued yesterday by a Texas appellate court, Edwards v. State (Tx. Apps. 13th Dist.).

Edwards was convicted on gun-smuggling charges and sentenced to forty years in prison.  Important evidence against him was a statement to a detective by an apparent confederate, Simmons, that Edwards was his supplier.  So there was no doubt that the statement was testimonial, and there's no suggestion that Edwards either had an opportunity for confrontation or forfeited the right.  (And, for good measure, it appears that Simmons was available, because Edwards contended that the State could have subpoenaed him.) The confrontation violation was clear.  

Unfortunately, the objection by Edwards's counsel did not explicitly mention the Confrontation Clause as a ground.  The trial court, in overruling it, explicitly referred to it as a hearsay objection, and the debate appears to have been over whether the statement fell within Texas's exception for statements against penal interest, Tex. R. Evid. 803(24)Cwhich, unlike its federal counterpart, Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(3), does not require unavailability.

The appellate court held that the Confrontation Clause issue was not preserved for review, because the objection did not cite the Clause specifically.  Two thoughts about that decision.  First, it seems somewhat stingy on its own terms.  Counsel did repeatedly complain that the State could have subpoenaed Simmons, and also that cross-examination was not possible; the appellate court might have interpreted these as sufficient to implicate the Clause.  Brooks v. State, 132 S.W.3d 702, 705 (Tex. Apps. 5th Dist. 2004), cited by Edwards in his appellate brief, is quite directly on point and offered ample authority for doing so.  But even apart from that, this would seem to be a very good case for applying the doctrine of "fundamental error," the rubric Texas uses for what other jurisdictions call "plain error."  (Edwards, perhaps confident that the issue was preserved given Brooks, did not invoke the possibility of fundamental-error review.)

So this strikes me as quite a bad decision.  But I feel like a coach after a close loss saying, "Don't complain about bad calls.  You've got to put yourself in a position where bad calls won't hurt."  Twenty years after Crawford, it certainly seems that defense counsel should be aware that there is this thing called the Confrontation Clause that they should at least think about when they're objecting to an out-of-court statement. Had trial counsel just mumbled the words "Confrontation Clause" this situation would not have arisen.  Why does this keep happening?      

I don't have a comprehensive answer, but I'll offer one speculation.  The traditional way of teaching hearsay is to go into some depth on the definition of hearsay, then into greater depth on the exceptions to the hearsay rule, and somewhere along the way, perhaps near the end, acknowledge that the Clause exists.  I think many Evidence teachers still do that, and so I suspect that a good many lawyers are insufficiently sensitized to the Clause.  Before Crawford, maybe this was justified. Since then, I believe, it really isn't.  ("Are there any textbooks that avoid this pitfall?" you may ask.  Oh, so glad you asked.)