We were lucky in the ARPA/PARC communities to have both great funding, and the time to think things through (and even make mistakes that were kept from propagating to create bad defacto standards).
The question you are asking is really a societal one -- and about operations that are like strip mining and waste dumping. "Hunters and gatherers" (our genetic heritage) find fertile valleys, strip them dry and move on (this only works on a very small scale). "Civilization" is partly about learning how to overcome our dangerous atavistic tendencies through education and planning. It's what we should be about generally (and the CS part of it is just a symptom of a much larger much more dire situation we are in).
So you're rephrasing the question to mean that you see it as 'hunter gatherer mode' thinking (doing it in a practical and short term economically-successful way) vs. 'civilized builder mode' thinking (doing it the way we know it should be done) and that they are antagonistic, and that because of the way our society is structured 'hunter gatherer' mode thinking leads to better economical results?
This ends up as a pretty strong critique of capitalism's main idea that market forces drive the progress of science and technology.
Your thinking would lead to the conclusion that we'd have to find a way to totally reshape/re-engineer the current world economy to stop it from being hugely biased in favor of "hunter gatherers that strip the fertile valley dry" ..right?
I hope that people like you are working on this :)
The question you are asking is really a societal one -- and about operations that are like strip mining and waste dumping. "Hunters and gatherers" (our genetic heritage) find fertile valleys, strip them dry and move on (this only works on a very small scale). "Civilization" is partly about learning how to overcome our dangerous atavistic tendencies through education and planning. It's what we should be about generally (and the CS part of it is just a symptom of a much larger much more dire situation we are in).