I was mildly troubled by the comment towards the end, "There were third- and fourth-generation members who I had no idea about who had signed up to talk about reliability without being second-guessed to death and hounded by people who just wanted to talk about [...] "a lot of work went into that"."

I've been sensitized, I guess. Yes, the way we do things is probably stupid. Yes, your favorite new framework or method or language or whatever might trivially fix all the problems that you can see. Heck, you might even be the smartest person in the room. But, there might also be a reason things things are stuck at a historical, local maximum.