While I can appreciate the complaint about 'assigning homework', we do in fact have epicycles of trying old ideas out again. What's important is to look at whether the constraints have changed at all. Certain software architectures excel when the ratio of CPU to memory to network to storage is just so, and those inequalities shift around depending on what the state of the art is in computing at the moment. Some new breakthrough may temporarily put us back into the same situation we were in in 1996 and so all of those ideas get retreaded. What has generally happened is however is that there are stable states that tend to repeat, and so some ideas are a reasonable default, and others are context sensitive and may need to be backed out if for instance the storage people get tired of being shown up by the networking people and introduce something with 1/5th the latency of the previous solution.

But too often it's just a pendulum swing between two competing options that are both painful, and familiarity breeds contempt. Those glorious moments at the bottom of the pendulum swing are the only time we have any peace. If 1 of something is awful, 100 of them is probably awful too. 3 might be wonderful, but half the team steamrolls right past it without stopping to look around.

Where the technology treadmill concerns new languages and tools, it's in the interest of young people for there to be upheaval because from their perspective, they have a level playing field if we are using a tool that is 2 years old. They also haven't experienced the heartbreak of pouring too much of yourself into a doomed technology and so they are willing to rathole on just about anything. That 'cynicism' they see might just be someone with an advanced case of Same Shit, Different Day. "This didn't work the last three times," is offered on its own merits, but some people put a lot more thought behind it. It could mean "don't try new things just because they're new" or it could mean, "the new thing has not solved any of the problems that killed it the last three times." I think if you mean the latter, it's partly on you that you get lumped in with the former, because you could chose to invest 10% more effort into your reply and sound less like a naysayer. But honestly it's exhausting chasing after kids every time they pick up something new and put it immediately in their proverbial mouth.