What took The New Yorker so long to recognize Eudora Welty's talent?

The Wanderers, the last story in Eudora Welty's 3rd collection, The Golden Apples (in "Collected Stories") is basically unreadable, despite some extraordinarily beautiful passages - e.g., Virgie sitting in the rain on a stile and surveying the town of Morgana, which she is soon to leave - but the story is meant to tie together all or many of the strands of the preceding stories in the collection, to make this modest work into Welty's version of a Faulkner novel, many interconnections in a small town, but honestly, though several of the stories are excellent, the characters from one to another are not signficantly distinct and I literally could not recall some of them or their histories and had no sense of where I was through 90 percent of this very long story. Welty's indirection, which serves her very well in her best, most challenging short stories, does not serve her well when she tries to build these stories into a novel. The next story in her Collected Stories is the first one in her 4th and final collection, story called No Place for You, My Dear, or something like that - amazingly, it was the first of her published by the New Yorker - what took them so long to recognize her talent? - and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is her most New Yorker-like story to date: about mature, sophisticated Northern visitors to the South, a man and a woman meet at a restaurant in New Orleans and head off toward the delta, each of them married, though they learn little about one another's lives, the story imbued with sexual tension and guilt and, as is typical of many Welty stories, nothing much happens between them overtly bt there's a great deal of internal emotional turbulence. The drive to the delta is one of the best passages she's every written - Walker Percy (The Moviegoer) had his character take a similar journey, perhaps in homage?, so did Richard Ford more recently I think. If this story were ever filmed, John Hamm/Don Draper would obviously play the guy (and maybe January Jones the girl?). Truly one of Welty's best stories, free of the mannerisms and weakness for sudden melodramatic violence that mar some of her other great ones.