The ratio of people who are capable of writing less-shitty software to the number of things we want to do with software ensures this problem will not get solved anytime soon.

Eh I disagree. Every software engineer I've ever worked with knows how to make some optimizations to their code bases. But it's literally never prioritized by the business. I suspect this will shift as IaaS takes over and it's a lot easier to generate the necessary graphs showing the stability of your product being maintained while the consumed resources has been reduced.