[mcguire]

"There are counterexamples I can think of -- new tools/abstractions/practices I've adopted that have resulted in near order-of-magnitude gains. But the ratio of these to other $NEW_TECH that just sort of shuffles the dirt around... well, that probably approaches another order-of-magnitude relationship."

Further, most people seem to have little appreciation of the difference between order-of-magnitude gains and shuffling the dirt around. Certainly, there are those who are wrong in assuming anything new is just dirt-shuffling, but for anyone without experience, everything offers an order of magnitude. And this really is an engineering discipline---$NEW_TECH is never as good as its proponents say, but it the best trade off in some circumstances, while $OLD_TECH is never as bad (or good) as the "general consensus" would have you believe, while it is almost certainly inappropriate under some scenarios.