the truth is, we don't care. We want innovation, but hard problems are... well... hard. I've been working on a project with the same goals as Viewpoint's for over 12 years, and getting attention or support has been almost impossible.
I initially put a caveat on my comment and then removed it -- and it admitted that I haven't been very public about the work. The attention and support would definitely be better if I published on Lambda, for example.
I didn't mean to moan about my project; I wanted to moan about lack of interest in the problem. For example, where my work has been publicized, the problem itself hasn't received much in the way of interest. Even the Ph.D. students who have worked on it have said, "But [Lisp/Smalltalk/Java(I'm sadly not joking here)/etc.] does everything you need to do." I shouldn't be surprised; there's no one to blame here but human nature. But I'm still occasionally frustrated. Of course, if you're interested in my project, my email is in my profile.
You must be talking to the wrong people. In my experience, when given the liberty, people tend to approach problems with either "let's solve this!" and "how can we solve this?". The former focuses on getting it done, the latter - on what the best process of getting it done is. Neither is superior, but the latter is who is interested in this stuff.
It's not just name dropping. While I appreciate the extra links, they do very little to put the project in context or explain why we should care. Alan Kay isn't just a big name, he's also a good essayist. While light on technical details, his articles are what prompted me to go out and learn more about FoNC and COLA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLA_(software_architecture)
http://piumarta.com/software/cola/
http://piumarta.com/software/cola/coke.html
Crazy neat stuff!