Biz47,
obviously you have no experience with designing or building SW, let alone SW for what would be a safety-critical application. But you presume to tell a self-identified professional IT person that there is a lack of imagination. There may be and it might well be yours. In a world which does not yet know how to deal with map shifts, building reliable, fault-tolerant, fail-safe systems which do some of those "simple" things you mention, to the required standards of reliability and fault-tolerance, is beyond state of the art.
PBL