Funny, I always read "A Fire Upon The Deep" as a commentary upon this very point. It seemed to me that Vinge was rubbing people's faces in the fact that our intuitions about technology, where each discovery has an associated "importance" lisp token, doesn't correspond to the way the world works. The Zones correspond to something that exists in the minds of people thinking about the future, but doesn't correspond to anything that could possibly turn out to exist in a consilient monistic world (as opposed to the Platonistic internal world of stories and computer games). The story seemed to me to be an expose of the lack of depth implicit it non-singularitarian world models given the necessity of mind in monistic worlds emerging from a manipulable substrate.

OTOH, no-one else seems to read it that way, and "A Deepness In The Sky" was deeply disappointing by dropping the theme, so I guess that my read wasn't intended after all.