Those would seem likely to be helpful indeed. Better programming tools might also help, as would additional computing power (not so much because computing power is actually a limiting factor today, as because we tend to scale our intuition about available computing power to what we physically deal with on an everyday basis -- which for most of us, is a cheap desktop PC -- and we tend to flinch away from designs whose projected requirements would exceed such a cheap PC; increasing the baseline makes us less likely to flinch away from good designs).