But I think it's not the case incentives are wrong but the reality of business - what do you do when things are feature complete in all the ways that matter?
I don't think we can really have software engineers without having software engineering...and despite the name in use I see very little evidence of actual engineering.
Today, Helsinki region was under drone alert with advice to stay indoors. It seems that the public warning system failed to notify a large number of users.
Not many information I could find but it seems you need to have latest version and always on location permissions to have a good chance of things working. However if you do, you'll probably notice battery drain and be spammed by low urgency alerts like traffic congestions.
The Finnish government recently agreed to finally adopt the standardized EU-Alert system by 2027 so there is hope for the future.
Years of school (reading, calculus etc) to get to the point of learning basics of set theory.
One day to learn basic SQL based on understanding the set theory.
Maybe few weeks of using SQL at work for ad hoc queries to be proficient enough (the query itself wasn't really complex).
For the domain itself I was consulting experts to see what matters.
I'm not sure that time it would take to know what to prompt and verify the results is much different.
Fun fact - management decided that SQL solution wasn't enerprisely enough so they hired external consultants to build a system doing essentialy that but in Java + formed an 8 people internal team to guide them. I heard they finished 2 years later with a lot of manual matching.
I seem to remember doing it in SQL (EDIT_DISTANCE) 20ish years ago. While I wouldn't say it worked beautifully, I also didn't need to make a single line of Rust :) also no more than 2 line s of SQL were needed.
May your wait be long.