To some extent, modes like FT8 have shown how effective modern encoding techniques can be. The problem, I suppose, is that FT8 is ridiculously structured; optimizing to the core the bare necessities of a QSO. I think that is probably the reason for its success; if I want to talk to people, it's easy to find them on the Internet. But accumulating QSOs is an achievement in and of itself, and something you can only do with ham radio, so the optimization is probably perfect.

As someone who's had the most ham radio success with FT8, I do find myself asking "what if there is an emergency"? I probably won't have power for my computer, and WSJT-X is pretty cumbersome to use while mobile. So we should probably be looking into other technologies, but the old standby CW seems good enough, so nobody is really looking.