Quality of software, software processes and the UML

Do you have any commentaries on the impact of the Unified Modeling Language?. Do you believe that software is best represented visually? Do you think that we can expect software quality to increase and development time to decrease as the UML usage increases?. Do yo have any opinions on the graphic constructs used in the UML? Do you see anything major missing?.

In my own personal experiences trying to educate others on software modeling techniques I have found that most programmers initially embrace modeling as an initial analysis of design effort, but once the have any code in place (either manually generated or engineered from the models) they never look back at the models.

Is it that the models’ expressiveness is not adecuate for what programmers want to express?.

I would love to hear your opinions.

Sincerely,
Brian