"Ness vs Tude" or "The Riddle of the Suffix"

        I was reading a chat with sports journalist Bruce Levine today, and he said this in response to a question about the atmosphere around Cubs Spring Training:

"We go by what the players tell us. And the players tell me it's more exact for a longer period of time this spring. But these are players who have had two managers replaced because of their ineptness over the last two years so you have to question their expertise as well."

And I was struck by one word in this general cop-out of an answer to a generally interesting question: Ineptness. At first, I thought there is no way that this is a word, shouldn't it be Ineptitude? So of course, I hit up google, and to my horror, I discovered that both ineptitude and ineptness are actual words. Why? Why do we need two different suffixes of one root that mean the same thing? On Free Dictionary the definition of Ineptitude is literally "The quality of being inept; ineptness." These two words mean the exact same thing, and one of them sounds clunky as all hell, and the other one sounds so cool. Why would anyone ever use ineptness rather than ineptitude? This is the curse of the English language, excessive homonyms, unnecessary as all get out. I guess it really shows America's ineptness at achieving any sort of lyrical dialect.