This is something that bothers me a lot. We've made huge, massive, spectacular progress in hardware. We know what the characteristics of our problems are (usually they're quite simple like CRM), yet software seems to ge slower, and more complex. With more layers of added complexity.
I simply do not see why continue to produce such bad software as a society. We continue to build on quicksand when a few hundred yards to the side is solid bedrock (lisps, ada, smalltalk, erlang, etc).
Back in the 50's we had teahouses in england [1] that fully automated their accounting/payroll system. On 50's hardware. Yet today we still need quad xeons to do even a fraction of that. It makes me very very angry to throw more hardware at a problem that has already been solved with orders of magnitude less.
The guys building big rigs care about performance - but never to the same tune as the guys designing F-1 racing cars. Different goals demand different approaches.
If you want to design jet fighters, go do that - and push the hardware to the absolute limits of human ability, but there is a glory in designing commuter jets too, you know.