I think no one talks about small changes to systems for the same reason the economists don't pick up the dollar in that old joke about the efficient market hypothesis; "if it worked, someone would have already done it". The idea that bonds weren't already sold as efficiently as possible is news to me, and likely news to most people.
There's also the tendency for people to disproportionally praise "big thinking"; when we think of ideas to fix a system, the only ideas we think of (or at least, the ideas I usually think of, unfortunately) are changing the system, not optimizing the existing system. And since optimizing the existing system doesn't sound like a big, important change to most people, those ideas never get propagated. The devil is in the details, but no one wants to be a nitpicker.
Recently I talked with a guy from Grant Street Group. They make, among other things, software with which local governments can auction their bonds on the Internet.
By making the auction process more transparent and easier to participate in, they enable local governments which need to sell bonds (to build a high school, for instance), to sell those bonds at, say, 7% interest instead of 8%. (At least, that's what he said.)
They have similar software for auctioning liens on property taxes, which also helps local governments raise more money by bringing more buyers to each auction, and probably helps the buyers reduce their risks by giving them more information.
This is a big deal. I think it's potentially more important than any budget argument that's been on the front pages since the 1960s. Yet I only heard of it by chance.
People would rather argue about reducing the budget by eliminating waste, or cutting subsidies to people who don't deserve it, or changing our ideological priorities. Nobody wants to talk about auction mechanics. But fixing the auction mechanics is the easy win. It's so easy that nobody's interested in it. It doesn't buy us fuzzies or let us signal our affiliations. To an individual activist, it's hardly worth doing.