At the time where turn 1 hypnotic specter was a threath swords of plowshares was perhaps not so good a choice since it generally takes more than 4 threath removers. It lately seems to have set on 5"swords" (1 path) so decks would have had to be RW RR or UU to stop hypnotic.
That was never a problem for me o.O the odds of them having hippie and dark ritual was less than of me having a swords, and then when we both had it, I always came out ahead because they put out 3 cards from their hands, and I put 2 cards from my hand out to solve their threat. Putting me ahead on card advantage. On turn 2, even if I had to discard to hippie to let it break even in CA, many more pieces of removal become live to either get rid of, or make them recast their hippie and waste 2 of their turns.
Turn one Hypnotic Specter 
tends to be relatively underwhelming and there are few other first turn combos that produce better results without requiring statistically improbable draws (or a card on the banlist/restricted list).
Interestingly enough, for as much as uncounterable spells miff some players, the most important reason for them to exist is to stop combo decks from protecting themselves (even though traditional point of view sympathizes with control decks, which is silly because counters in control decks are usually to crush other control decks or to undo combos in time to not outright lose)
