Of course, if anyone had owned real estate, they'd understand things like depreciation, and the fact that you can spend money without it being an 'expense', or that no, just because you 'made $1,000,000 and spent $1,000,000' doing something like building a house, or a piece of code, you could of course show an accounting profit. You created something of value--that's the point. There's something of value left over. Maybe there won't be in five years, but you can't expense the entire thing immediately.
I actually think this treatment (capitalization of software R&D) is more "correct" from a theoretical accounting perspective. Clearly, software companies are creating something that has residual value with all those developer salaries. As for the politics, I'm not sure. I do know that RE has the same problem (accounting profit can run far ahead of cashflow), but has so much crazy advantaged tax treatment (arguably "loopholes")--1031 exchanges, bonus depreciation--and that's on top of stuff like 179 expensing (not specific to RE I know, but still), that maybe software just needs to work more like RE, where the baseline is "many things capitalized", but all sorts of crazy loopholes driven by the whims of short-term politics.
It certainly makes the accountants rich...
FWIW, my wife's architecture practice is dealing with this 174 amortization (on their salaries, some of which were classified as R&D) and it's killing them, too.