I think this boils down to two things: We're not that smart and the problems we're solving are either too ambiguous or have too many engineering dimensions. A

I think this boils down to two things: We're not that smart and the problems we're solving are either too ambiguous or have too many engineering dimensions. A lot of the people implementing distributed systems have some knowledge of CAP, FLP and know of solutions to those problems- but compared to dist. sys. researchers it's somewhat superficial. I also think there is a bit of posturing in CS; people are afraid to not grok these kinds of systems and so instead go off to build the wrong thing.