[jng]

"Sheer brute force" is probably a bit of an exaggeration. But just a bit. As you describe yourself, the kind of advance from C to more modern languages is a step away from "sheer brute force" and towards reasonable approaches. And only a small step compared to where we have to get before this is engineering.

I'd say a much larger part of all software projects is dysfunctional compared to the same in architectural or civil engineering projects, and I think this situation will greatly improve in the future, thanks to a handful of qualitatively innovative insights providing enormous improvements that we are yet to see.