the thing is, nothing is stopping us from going back and doing things properly.

for instance, the whole 80s thing of distributed, shared-nothing computing is still up for grabs. it wasn't pursued outside of research labs because it was hard and not backwards compatible, but now even our microcontrollers have multiple cores, it's ripe for revisiting - especially as it turns out that the most signficant feature of shared-everything SMP is how easy it makes side-channel attacks