> The bleeding edge is discovering how to express good ways to control the non-von Neumann hardware whose computational capacity completely overwhelms the pile of cores we are handed

Namely? What non-von-Neumann hardware are you thinking of here? Certainly not the very-much-von-Neumann innards ubiquitous today in consumer or workstation machines, mobiles, embedded/wearable/IoT gadgets, game consoles, I reckon.. so what are you thinking of here, custom-designed ASICs / FPGAs / SoC or ...?