We have been emphasizing on creating abstractions since forever. We now have several different hardware platforms, programming languages, OS's, a gazillion web frameworks, tons of databases, build tools, clustering frameworks and on and on and on. We havn't done so entirely collectively, but I don't think the amount of choice here reflects that we are stupid, but that rather that "one size doesn't fit all". Think about the endless debates and flame wars about the "best" of those abstractions. I'm sure that Skynet will end that discussion and come up with the one true and only abstraction needed ;)