Sadly it's more of a 'wrong' requirement from the customer. Today's entreprise customers expect things to Just Work. They say 'just sell us a goddam appliance, we'll point a browser at it and we'll call it a day!'. I'm quoting real customers' documents here: 'it's should be as easy as Apple'. We've done it to ourselves.
I expect things to just work and I expect them to work for a reasonable lifespan. I often think that a piece of software ought to live as long as a car, and for something commercially created (e.g. costs as much as a house) then it ought to last at least a generation (30years).
I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. In a closed system this should be doable.
edit: one of the reasons I think this is because we are supposed to be engineers, and other engineering disciplines do it (and their disciplines involve computes too). Consider jets and boats.
Jets, boats, and cars all require regular servicing. Parts need fixing and updating and it isn't one and done. The allegory isn't exactly the same as software updates but the allegory of software systems to cars isn't exact either.
I get what you say. But are you, let's say, a Catia ISO programmer who has been thrown as a leader of a project team which purpose is to buy some piece of a tier software/project that will automagically cut your programming time by half?
He may be an engineer, whatever that means, but still: the average joe in that position will not spend a single second on thinking if he expects the solution he's buying to work for a reasonable lifespan. He's been thrown in a project, that's all. If you force him to state a requirement on the expected lifespan, he will surely say 'Well, as long as possible seems good to me'.
Disclaimer: statistics applies here, of course some people will care, but I'm speaking about the 80%, if not more.
Until there is tangible motivation (i.e. multiple players get publicly put out of business by lax security), customers will continue to refuse to understand things they cannot put their hands on.
