Cobblers children tend to go without shoes maybe?

I suspect some of it is just the joy of solving (or trying to solve the problem) means the unsexy work of digging through hundreds or thousands of old papers gets forgotten.

And looking at things with a fresh view (which isn’t going to happen after looking at all those old papers) does have value.

I find the freshest view is typically in the foundational papers (not necessarily in computer science, but generally). Always go back and look.

Please allow me a snarky comment: Coddler's children.

Such a format would not matter, because most programmers are anti-research, anti-math, and anti anything other than shipping Agile software.

Programmers are not computer scientists any more than civil engineers are material researchers.

Software "engineering" isn't. It's all about processes and very little about standardization of process and verification of outcomes.

Found one in the wild.

Ironically, if there were a database that would allow querying for this type of things... What's the State of the Art on X ? Where are we on Y ? Has the problem in paper Z been solved ?

I think in a lot of cases, it's partly a question of where the material was (on paper, not necessarily in libraries, possibly at obscure conferences). That's the case for a various things I'd like to refer to, and the system I used for physics research was never written up anyway. In this context and example is information on Logica's RAPPORT, allegedly the first commercial, portable RDB, which had some significance in UK research support.