I hold the pan over the plate, which works much better. (I do that with coffee jars too, when they're not much too large to lift, like this one.)

The willingness to accept bad design is presumably a third factor in why manufacturers don't generally find it worth their while to fix things or to pre-emptively avoid flaws in the first place; if their customers can't be bothered to vote with their wallets and will continue forking out money for a broken product, why bother?