Today, artists are above programmers in terms of budget in most game houses. They license the 250K engine most of the time and throw in additional 500K for staff of developers to make it do what they want it to do, the rest of the majority is spent on artists.
What we need is what the Unreal engine and other like that brought to the developers. You can license it for 250K and save yourself re-inventing the same wheel if your game idea follows the same line. Now, of course there will always be someone that sais that they need to write a custom engine from the ground up, but that is not the norm for cookie cutter games.
It's really about time the hardware manufacturers started filling in these gaps. Why do software houses have to develop or license Renderware-like engines... why aren't these new consoles Renderware-in-a-box? You really shouldn't need any coders to produce a mainstream commercial game - just scripters, gfx artists and audio guys. The idea that you have this empty space to fill up with custom code before you can even begin is old fashioned.
With respect to cutting content production down - reference models and textures would be my suggestion. It's a no-brainer, really, with the only real question being how it should be organised... I like the notion of 'prop-shops' but these only seem to be embraced by the shareware (development) market currently.
Concerning change, the main problem at the moment is that the big players like the winner-takes-all market, and development cost is one way in which they can keep the stakes high. The market leaders really have nothing to gain from development being less painful and risky, because they can weather the storm while the smaller competition goes under. Until the market flaty decides any further improvement in visual fidelity is undesirable I can't see those pushing it altering course - it's never going to happen for the genral good of the form.