Are international sports federations luddite?

As a racing cyclist, I'm pretty aware of the equipment restrictions put in place by the sport's governing body, the UCI.  While many of these restrictions are really aimed at safety (such as prohibiting the use of aero bars on road race bikes), many seem to be just a reaction to increased technological developments.

Thus, we are faced with regulations that among other things aim to

• restrict the aerodynamics of the components of a time trial bike, such as handlebars and seat pin (the 3:1 rule - Another loony regulation from the UCI)
• restrict the ability of the rider to ride in an aerodynamic posture.  this is by restricting various dimensions of the bike.  Interestingly, the UCI chose to specify absolute rather than relative dimensions thereby unfairly penalising small or large riders, for whom morphological exemptions can be sought.
• Insist that both wheels must be the same size
• Insist that bicycle frames must be composed of triangualr elements, thereby prohibiting many of the advances monocoque composite designs possible
• Throw out the classic hour record which had featured many technical advances in favour of the "athlete's hour" which rolls back the record to the days of Eddy Merckx

Quite why the UCI luddites take this stance is unclear to me (but the portrayal of their fictional equivalent in "The Flying Scotsman" film treatment of Graeme Obree's autobiography is darkly amusing).

The BBC reports that the international swimming federation, (FINA) is cracking down on swimsuits (Fina cracks down on hi-tech suits) with regulations that sound terribly similar in tone to those of the UCI.  FINA now have a problem shared by the UCI when they introduced the Athlete's Hour - what do you do with all the records set using banned equipment?  In the case of the hour record, the UCI just put the post-Merckx records on the shelf and started afresh.  But in swimming, where there are a profusion of technically very similar events, large numbers of records were set within the last year using these high tech swimsuits.  It'll be interesting to see whether those record have set the bar so high that it will be many years before they are surpassed.