[owalt]

I work on a <500kB RAM embedded project currently (and similar constraints in previous ones), and I can pretty much mirror what you said. The current project is in the planning/early development phase, and it's like everybody forgot the multi-month entire-app refactors we had to do twice to save some small fraction of total RAM in the previous project. But when you're pushing for another release with another too-tight release schedule, suddenly RAM savings are not an immediate but a future problem.

For us the day will come where we atone for our sins and have to again put off feature updates for months of RAM optimization. But in the PC/server/mobile space, that day gets pushed off whenever people move on to better hardware. So why not continue to bloat your applications, really? There's little incentive to do otherwise. If clunky abstractions make your developers ever so slightly happier, what's the reason not to embrace them?