And robustness is often the static plastic bubble that hides in itself, never accomplishing much in the real world.

State is too often the real world.

Mind you, I like robustness. It's like the cinder blocks I use to build my house, each robust and contained in itself. I just can't disregard state when stacking my cinder blocks on top of each other; the flexing and distribution of load is an emergent state that I have to consider when building each cinder block.