More than 20 years after the invention of the IBM PC (and the Apple Macintosh, for that matter), why is it still so difficult to build robust applications?

MS would have developers migrate to .Net. On top of learning a new language (for pretty much everyone except C++ programmers), learning a large class "framework" seems to be required. It looks far from "easy" and is likely to leave a lot of developers behind. Superficially it looks like Kevin McNeish has an interesting niche with his "Mere Mortals for .Net" framework; I don't know how much it helps out learning the .Net classes. And, Mono aside (I'm not sure how "compatible" a non-MS runtime can ever be), .Net is Windows-only.

Not having used Java, my impression is it's no piece of cake either and the available tools are not as "developer-friendly" as typical MS offerings (from the few comparative reviews I've read).

LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl [or PHP or Python]) seems increasingly popular but my impression is it's mostly for Web based apps, may not be too suitable for desktop apps. Technology is relatively new and tools not as advanced as MS or Java.

I like that VFP has multiple 3rd party frameworks available. Their judicious use can really boost productivity. But, for those cases where technology matters, it's not mainstream.

In general, it seems that the disconnect between functional descriptions (e.g. receive input, calculate/verify, store data, retrieve data) and their implementation, is greater than ever.

This industry has had a large cadre of brilliant people working in it for a long time. Why does it seem that development is getting more complex rather than easier?