Great reflections. Like Kent Beck said, "Software is a leverage game."

Stafford Beer would also agree with you by the way. His whole thing is that the computational complexity of any decently sized organization is mathematically overwhelming, and the way to cope with it is via organization (or as you called it, architecture). "Sphaghetti code" is basically what you get when you allow every signal the system produces to become embodied in your code base, which inevitably creates so much noise that it becomes almost impossible to modify efficiently.