>A problem with this from my point of view is that while hardware engineers did an incredible job increasing the processing power of our thinking rocks, us software devs did a tremendous job of squandering 90% of it away.

That works both ways though. The highly qualified software devs did indeed squander some of it away.

But I'm a rather bad dev that writes really inefficient code (because it's not my primary concern, I'm not a programmer, I just need custom software that does the things I need done that can't be done by software other people write).

All this overpowered hardware allows my code to work very well.

I've been in situations where I could pick between "learn to program properly and optimize my code" or "throw more hardware at it" and throwing more hardware at it was definitely the faster and more efficient approach in my case.