Nah actually mixture your coming across as one of those IT types who has a very admin encentric view on the way the world wrks similar to the bloke whoes fingers i broke.
You have your picture but not the big picture. You have your views on your ideal world but that doesn't fit with reality.
I have been running high end hardware since i was a finite element engineer and its never changed we run them at 100% cpu and disk and when we are generating images the video gets a kicking as well. Our runs especially none linear take days not mins. The code we used to use was optimised for crays, which roll royce used.
My salary was 22k as an engineer, the hardware and software was approaching 35k a year when i was 25. Silcon graphics extreme grahics and ansys.
I will admit i fired a screw driver into the apple talk port on the A1 plotter when we got it.
Not sure who you are talking too, but my main work is 2 things, consulting work for large enterprise systems and electronic engineering. From a development perspective, both jobs require fairly high end, high powered systems. I am one of those exceptions to the rule though. You will find that for 99% of people here, all they need is email, web and word processor. Any cheap piece of hardware will do that just fine these days.