All the three points in the "wishlist" are real-world problems, something which academic conferences will shun straight-away. All work in areas like configurati

All the three points in the "wishlist" are real-world problems, something which academic conferences will shun straight-away. All work in areas like configuration management must be either a)Evolutionary work based off existing tools. This unfortunately doesn't qualify as good-enough research OR b)A radically new approach, which is almost useless unless a robust enough solution is developed, deployed, and tested. Researchers prefer multiple papers over perfecting the engineering of software tools. Hence there is no incentive for academic systems researchers to focus on these (it's no fun having paper after paper shot down).