I don't live in Silicon Valley and I don't talk to VCs, so I can't really comment from that perspective. I'm a software developer approaching 60, and wrote my first program in 1972 when I was 16. I love software and software technology; however, I find it quite frustrating that we employ the same tools and processes to develop software today as was used in the 1960s. I'd love to come up with better, more efficient development tools. For one thing, I'm a highly visual thinker; I see solutions in my mind, and having to translate them into a verbal expression (as code) to implement them is like having to plant grass in a detailed pattern and watch it grow. You'd think VCs would be lined-up to fund something like this, but so much software tech has shifted to open-source that it's hard to make money with it any more.
That said, I'm not infatuated with the technology we create for mass consumption the way most people are, including other programmers. I don't care about the things that seem to be catching fire in the app world -- they seem to cater to the more narcissistic side of humanity which holds very little appeal to me.
The only thing I can suggest is that there are so many of these silly "reach out and touch people" apps because people ARE narcissistic, and our society seems to be making people paranoid of interacting with others directly. If you're a VC, you're probably looking for anything that's subject to the Law of Large Numbers, which is anything that appeals to tens of millions of kids (who are infatuated, if not addicted to mobile tech) where a small fraction of them are capable of generating some kind of monetary activity.
However, I think we're in a kind of infatuation phase where the market tends to get all googely-eyed over fairly simple things. It'll wear off, and more complex apps will begin to come on the scene.
I'm working on something myself that's based on an idea originally conceived 20 years ago that has been waiting for the technology to evolve sufficiently to make it feasible. And the feedback I'm getting is showing me ways to bust it out into an entirely new experience, given the ability of mobile apps to fundamentally transform the underlying approach and process.
Take a look around the app landscape and ask yourself, "how many of today's apps are simply linear extrapolations of existing concepts with lots of eye-candy, versus those that represent totally transformed approaches?" Mobile tech has the potential to transform the ways we do things, but I haven't seen much in that direction yet. Which tells me the game has barely begun!