Obviously economic incentives have an impact on what problems get worked on, but economic incentives can’t reduce the complexity of problems. I think what we ha

Obviously economic incentives have an impact on what problems get worked on, but economic incentives can’t reduce the complexity of problems. I think what we have here is a problem of irreducible complexity. The reason that abstractions like the “Image” or “Table” you described one your article are few and far between is because it’s really hard to implement these objects in a way that scales to fit a broad enough set of use cases. The design of such objects involves making a set of tradeoffs where tradeoff space has a very high dimensionality and lots of shallow local optima.