Ain't that the truth?
Now, with bazillions of bytes to play with, programming becomes quite sloppy and wasteful.
One of the things that hurts is the attitude of acceptance for "quick and dirty".
Granted there are good things that you can do with more memory (i.e. full debug symbols, more expressive data-structures, etc).
IMO, we're quickly approaching a point where an formally proved and verified OS (and compiler) are needs, not wants… but that's directly antithetical to the mindset put forward in large portions of "the industry" (i.e. web-site programming).
Re: formally proven OS
It has been done, but an operating system is kinda useless without apps. I’d love to see something like that, but I suspect you’ll only ever see it as a niche product. ATM machines would be an excellent application.