I think you have this backwards in practice. It was in the 80s that I first read a paper about a de-novo protein design engineered for a specific stable conformation. Natural proteins have no reason to be particularly predictable, just as genetic programming produces hard-to-understand programs relative to human-written ones. In fact making the structure especially stable against perturbations seems like it'd make it less responsive to changing evolutionary pressures.
(Am not a structural biologist.)
Added: 2019 article on de novo design: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02251-x Not to say that better prediction won't also make design easier -- of course I expect it will.