In the modern version of Pandora's Box, "advanced technology" is one of the trickier devils. The benefits of faster, lighter, cheaper, longer service life, etc. are tempting bait for justification of new methods and materials. Every effort is, or should be, made to ensure proper engineering and testing of the new technology, and then it goes out into the world to confront the realities of long, hard use in astonishingly difficult conditions with little tolerance for weakness and great penalties for failure.
Some technologies - such as those in engine structures and components - have maintenance intervals and teardown cycles that reveal incipient faults. Others, including primary structures and materials embedded deep within the airframe, are not amenable to casual review. Some of us speculate that the technology for evaluating the strength and margin of safety for composite materials in air carrier applications may not have caught up with the rapidly expanding use of these materials.
A similar disconnect between design element complexity and limited availability of effective means for maintenance seems likely also to become manifest in the hardware, software, and the wiring of systems for flight controls, engines, and other automated functions. A hundred years from now, perhaps very detailed and thoroughly reviewed public standards will exist for fail-soft functionality and diagnosability of all critical subsystems. At present, the standards and methods at the finest levels of detail are mostly at the discretion of the manufacturing companies, who are unlikely to freely disclose critical data about flaws when company-killing problems and litigation arise.
There will be interesting times to come, as the 21st century airframe fleet ages. A new generation of scary problems may necessitate aggressively raising the bar for maintainability methods and standards.