I think there's a more fundamental problem: software developers can imagine specific ways to usefully use more power, but more general ways (like prediction, su

I think there's a more fundamental problem: software developers can imagine specific ways to usefully use more power, but more general ways (like prediction, suggestion, automating automation itself) are fundamentally hard and not well understood. These things verge on what used to be called AI, and require a different level of complexity from things like operating systems and web browsers, even though the codebase might be smaller. I think there's a complexity problem that hasn't been solved (though procedural, OO, and functional programming were all supposed to solve this, to one degree or another) in any mainstream programming methodology. It's possible that it's solved in academia, but most academic solutions for things in computer science take many years or even decades to reach mainstream programming, for whatever reason.