I'm sure there are some "in the know" who are trying to tackle this (and other) problems of distributed computing, but the fact that Web services requires every developer to be a distributed computing guru is a problem I don't believe will ever be overcome.

IMO, what's needed is an general application framework that already addresses many of the known hard problems, making it easier for the average developer to produce applications which will work well over the Internet. And I think we've already got one; the Web.