Victor, I have to disagree with you on this one. I understand Fred Brooks, in his paper No Silver Bullet, a little differently.

Dr. Brooks said: "First, one must observe that the anomaly is not that software progress is so slow, but that computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude price-performance gain in 30 years. In no other technology, can one choose to take the gain in either improved performance or in reduced costs. These gains flow from the transformation of computer manufacture from an assembly industry into a process industry.

Second, to see what rate of progress one can expect in software technology, let us examine its difficulties. Following Aristotle, I divide them into essence, the difficulties inherent in the nature of the software, and accidents, those difficulties which today attend its production but which are not inherent."

This inherent (essential) software complexity, of which Dr. Brooks was speaking, mostly comes from the number of things (APIs, services, resources) and connections between them. When the number of things increases, essential complexity increases non-linearly, i.e., c = n(n-1)/2.

Good architecture, design, coding practices, and tools can help to manage that essential complexity, but are unlikely to eliminate it.