I look at it this way. People are all designing a better gun to kill an
elephant with cotton balls.
All the time there are improvements.
"I made a triple-barreled hypersonic cotton ball gun that can kill a
mid-sided elephant with just a million shots in half an hour" :)
And all technological innovations lie in faster cotton balls and more
barrels, whereas real progress would be: Using bullets.
It's off topic and I understand your point, but at some point speed
works better than hardness and firing very fast objects does work quite
well against armor. You could kill a tank with a butter tablet if it's
fast enough... (and maybe if it does not burn in the air before
reaching the tank...) And aren't the infamous depleted uranium bullets
kind of soft, their "benefit" being that they vaporize and burn through
armor?