My opinion on it being so prevalent is because it is allowed to happen. I think they have been trying to crack down on it but if there were somehow allow for players to fined (suspended?) if they were caught diving it would slowly become less of issue. (It would obviously have to be something that officials would look for in the video replay after the game is over... perfect example is the dive materrazi took recently, don't notice it at the time, but if officials could look at it on a later date they would see the dive). The only difficulty is that some dives are more obvious than others, so there's no way everyone would be happy with it.
