When you look at software engineering as a research field, you can see some pretty serious progress there. There are amazing projects like PyPy and LLVM, massive optimizations in gcc and JIT compilers (HotSpot, Psyco, TraceMonkey). Compared to that, I have the impression that the reverse engineering community did not produce any significant results. What we have is disassemblers, that is to say parsers.

To make things even worse, the more advanced tools used in RE have been created for a totally different purpose (think Pin, VEX, QEMU, Bochs, virtualization…). Some nice works are being performed by folks like Sean Heelan, Silvio Cesare, the Sogeti R&D team (metasm, fuzzgrind) and the BitBlaze team (TEMU, Vine). But overall I can see no open, community-driven, formally sound approach. The tools are either not FOSS, limited in scope, or just not-that-reusable.

There is a number of potential factors to explain the situation:

reversers are not developers (this, I think, is a big factor)

reversers are solitary, basement programmers (not to mention cheese pops and japanese tentacle porn)

the complexity of x86 + Windows makes the entry cost too high for academics

We are therefore left with a research niche with virtually no academics, little to no developer community, that still pumps some big bucks. The only player left is the security industry, i.e. corporations which have absolutely no incentive to solve the problem.

Did I miss something, or is the picture really that grim?