For the morning crowd here's a paper I wrote:
Control Theory For Distributed Systems: A New View of Operations at Scale
https://evilchili.github.io/control-theory-for-distributed-systems.html
An interesting take on computer systems and control theory.
Based on your reading list I can recommend John Gall, "Systemantics", in a subsequent edition as "The Systems Bible". Gall is a contemporary of Bertalanffy, but more attuned to the antics that systems can display when they pursue their own tendencies.
I hear you about the ever-growing linked list (more like a head of heaps in my own experience). I keep coming back to Systemantics because it has an acute understanding and appreciation for systems and how they fail, with a continuous state of partial failure being the normal situation in systems of any size.
s/head of heaps/heap of heaps/
@ed_packet Systemantics is definitely on my ever growing linked list of reading. Maybe I"ll shuffle him up some :D