What is the likely future of real-time transient stability?

Despite very intensive research efforts in the field of transient stability during the last five decades, the large majority of the derived techniques have hardly moved from the research laboratories to the industrial world and, as a matter of fact, the very large majority of today's control centers do not make use of any real-time transient stability software. On the other hand, along all these years the techniques developed for real-time transient stability have mainly focused on the definition of stability margins and speeding-up techniques rather than on preventive or emergency control strategies. In the light of the above observations, this paper attempts to explain the reasons for lack of industrial interest in real-time transient stability, and also to examine an even more fundamental question, namely: is transient stability, as has been stated many decades ago, still the relevant issue in the context of the new power systems morphology towards more dispersed generation, higher penetration of power electronics, larger and more complex structures, and, in addition, of economic and environmental constraints? Or, maybe, there is a need for techniques different from those developed so far?