I just wanted to get this out there so people might be able to weigh in- you said "hardly anyone smart is working on making them better." First, let me say I completely agree. But what I was hoping for some feedback on is the WHY? I can say, from experience, my company doesn't even TRY to retain the "smart" people. We've been working on a huge, revolutionary change to our internal systems for almost 3 years now, but practically every "smart" person has been smart enough to jump ship. We've lost every senior dev and architecture person to other giant monolithic companies where they get paid to do EXACTLY the same thing. The funny part (to me anyway) is that nobody has even tried to retain those that are leaving. So we just continue to hemorrhage the great talent and the quality on the project goes down down down. I'm also pretty disappointed to see those people who were my friends going to companies that are just as bad as here- only because it's more money (so maybe they weren't that smart after all!)
I propose that it's a combination of two factors: 1. smart people are bored doing this type of work and will leave when they perceive a better opportunity (I'm going to as well in the next few weeks). 2. Companies don't understand that getting the "rockstar" talent is important, don't know how to recognize it when they have it, and don't know how to keep it when they DO find it. I think this was touched on pretty well in a few previous posts (I'll try to find the links and stick them on here in a bit).
You don't happen to work for a certain San Mateo based software company, do you?