As a group of professionals, it is highly beneficial for us to be interested in these things. People who design languages and compilers do it largely on what is perceived as being demanded, and us as programmers are the ones that create the demand for new languages.

To put in other words, if programmers aren't aware of what's going wrong with our current languages, they cannot express their need for new languages. So, there's less incentive for researchers to produce new ways of programming computers. It is much more tempting to "please the masses" in a way that causes this local-maximum problem. It's much more interesting to research problems that translate into mainstream use than academic things that nobody actually uses.