The conundrum of distributed computing

We have been engineering distributed computing architectures according to roughly the same formulas for quite a number of years; yet each time, the end result has had greater complexity. Modern distributed computing architectures have an enormous number of protocols, layers, configuration parameters, APIs, etc. While we seem to be proceeding in the right direction in functionality, the growth in complexity is perplexing and has the potential to slow progress in research and in commercial use. I'll discuss this topic and propose areas of research that are relevant to resolving the issue.