[3princip]

One could argue that the increase in hardware performance of computers has led to the art of software design falling by the wayside. Horribly inefficient software runs because the hardware performance hides the truth under the hood.

[girvo]

That in theory gives a programmer who does care about performance an edge: they can leverage the amazing performance of modern day chips in a way that the average product doesn’t, and it should mean a business advantage...

In practice it seems more complex than that — but I have experienced a softer version of that idea in practice with my own work. Performance does matter, but it isn’t the only factor.

[salawat]

Unfortunately, you lose that advantage because in days of yore, people knew the implementation details of their hardware, and would optimize around that. With microcode. and the sheer size of certain instruction sets, it is very difficult to do the same thing, particularly mow that the philosophy of programming/computing has shifted to accomodate the industry as an omnipresent actor in your execution environment, and furthermore one with even more rights to observable machine state than you, the owner of the damn thing.

Your point on inefficient code stands, but there is far more at play than mere "programmers aren't skilled enough" and "imagine the possibilities!"

I'll wager a true Mel would not be an easy thing to reoccur nowadays.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html