> If you could go from bridge design in CAD to actual working bridge in meatspace in ~30 seconds and for $0.01 then yeah, there'd be millions of horrible, horrible bridges EVERYWHERE.

That's a fantastic and well made point. It's akin to the cost of communications dropping over time. When moving words around the world was expensive people tended to stick to the important stuff, but now that the cost has essentially dropped to 0 we are drowning in irrelevant information.

> If it were possible to make software better, faster, cheaper by just imposing some discipline, why haven't dozens of companies done so and taken over the world?

Because the it likely is more than just 'some discipline' and because the market forces are working against you, after all nobody even expects software to be reliable so your competitor going to market with unreliable junk will eat your lunch if you slow down long enough to get it right, assuming you know what to build in the first place.