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Morendil comments on Diseased disciplines: the strange case of the inverted chart - Less Wrong
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Wait, what are the ACM, the IEEE, the SEI and their journals; or the ICSE conference (International Conference on Software Engineering) that has been running since 1975? And some major corporations have been publishing in these venues about their successes and (maybe some) failures.
I was agreeing with you (or at least not sure enough to disagree) when you said "most software engineers don't go to conferences", but "there are no conferences" is definitely inaccurate.
The ICSE conference has attendance figures listed here: http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/events/icse2009/ExhibitProspectus.pdf. In 2008, they had 827 attendees.
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in 2008 there were 1.3 million software engineers employed in the United States alone. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm
There are plenty of conferences, even non-academic ones, relating to computer science and software engineering, such as GDC, the Game Development Conference. However, very few focus on the methodology of software engineering, unless they're for a specific methodology, such as conferences for Agile or XP.
I subscribe to a few ACM journals; out of the 11 other software engineers in my office, none of the rest do. We build software for airplanes, so plenty more subscribe to the likes of Aviation Week, but none about software engineering. The plural of anecdote is not data, but it's illustrative all the same.
Edit: I decided to add some clarification. I agree with you on your observations about software engineering as a field, including the problems that exist. My main point is, I'd expect them to exist in any field as broad and non-academic as software engineering, and I also don't see any way to fix it, or the situation to otherwise become better. That's why I disagree with the "diseased" adjective.