Agreed. Our field is still incredibly young, speaking as if we've tried everything that can be tried sounds a lot like when physicists were figuring out relativ

Agreed. Our field is still incredibly young, speaking as if we've tried everything that can be tried sounds a lot like when physicists were figuring out relativity. Many believed that the problems were simply unsolvable, that all of physics had been figured out in the late 1800s. Obviously they were wrong, and I think many of today's computer scientists will be wrong as well. Our field has a long way to go before it matures, in the meantime we need to find better abstractions. Claiming that it's "all a cycle" is incredibly short sighted considering the time-scale.