[bollockitis]

> An endless supply of naive, impressionable kids willing to listen to people rant about how everything sucks and X will change the world.

There's also the problem that an engineer who successfully builds a bridge simply keeps to continue building bridges. In software, a 21-year-old programmer can build a webapp, sell it to Google, and walk away a multi-gajillionaire. If engineers could sell bridges to Google, we'd be seeing a lot of strange methods of crossing a river.

It's not just that developers look for silver bullets -- that's a natural instinct in any discipline -- it's that developers have a very real incentive for building and marketing silver bullets.