well, inovations may happen and they may not but you are talking about two different things here, technical innovations and political/tax/investor relations .
i can agree with you that most of the reservoir engineers of the 50's and 60's were crew cut and pocket protector wearing, slide rule wielding conservative who didnt want to ever over estimate reserves. they werent worried about being wrong by being too conservative. and i suppose exxon, chevron and bp are still in that mode to some extent.
arent ceo's today more worried about the value of their stock options and thus aren't their suv driving suburb living windows operating compliant reservoir engineers more likely to over rather than under estimate reserves ?
that and i think you are way too impressed with this whiz bang technology, with the exception of computers we are doing things largly as the crew cut wearing ones did.

Hothgor.

Reserves and Reserve growth:

The proof of a pudding is in the eating.

Explain how you square reserve growths against year on year reductions in Flows from specific, countries, regional basins and component fields.

And anyway where are the reserve growths of which you speak?

The lower 48, Alaska, UKCS and Norway have pretty good data for you to work on.

All, it would seem, are suffering reduced flows.

We are talking about the good stuff here: Cheap, easily extracted, light sweet crude.

You know. The stuff that has powered the planet for 60 years. Forget the sub-oil shales, tar sands and ethanol as important components in the Liquids flow levels. For sure, count the high sulpher heavy oils and other sludges that are still found in conventional geological formations and traps etc but need more energy to extract.

I cannot understand why this is such a big conceptual problem.

Maybe kids spend too much time playing on computers and not enough time playing at the sink with different sizes of cups and buckets and water.