[jacquesm]

You are about 100% right on the mark here. There is only one slight problem: people don't want to pay for very high quality software except in a very limited number of fields.

In a way every real software improvement (not fancy language flavor 'x' of the year but entirely new ways of developing software) have always been with the main goals of writing software with fewer bugs faster.

That's the whole reason we have abstractions, compilers, syntax checkers, statical analyzers and so on. In spite of all those, software still has bugs and budgets are still not sufficient to write bug free software.

On another note: this problem is getting worse over time. As tools improved codebases got larger and the number of users multiplied at an astounding rate resulting in many more live instances of bugs popping up. After all, software that contains bugs but that is never run is harmless, only when you run buggy software many times does the price of those bugs really add up.

Somewhere we took a wrong turn and we decided that more of the same is a better way to compete than to have one of each that is perfected and honed until the bugs have been (mostly...) ironed out.