I agree that this is our profession's Achilles heel. But I see one more cause: binaries and processes are black boxes unless they deliberately implement an interconnect feature. Try to extract the list of playlists from a Spotify client, for example.

We lucked into filesystems that have open structures (even if the data is opaque). Perhaps we should be pushing for "in-memory filesystems" as a default way of storing runtime data, for example.