To add to this: In my career I've personally witnessed so many instances of people saying "Well, this can all be automated..." and then starting enormous projec

To add to this: In my career I've personally witnessed so many instances of people saying "Well, this can all be automated..." and then starting enormous projects to automate a process that is currently the sole focus of literally hundreds of engineers. As if the reason there are hundreds of engineers doing this job is that all those guys are just idiots. The result is these massively ambitious projects that promise senior management the world, drag on forever, often justifying themselves with hand-optimized toy examples to show progress. In the end the actual problem is very obviously intractable and years of progress are wasted. It might be true that eventually we can solve "implementing cross-platform UIs in the general case" but we could also be literally 100 years away from achieving that, and in the mean time the fact that it's theoretically possible is worthless.