"Has the day of staring at NOC screens gone away or do we need to find ways to increase reliability of alarms and pollers sending alerts to our desktops/phones?"
I think this goes both ways and depends on your organization. In our organization we are trying to move toward the latter because it increases your organizational capabilities and in the end, would increase your uptime. At the point where the system alerts are presenting information before systems go down or are degraded in some way and the Engineers can react, the organization can grow in positive ways. Would this push toward reducing the NOC force? I don't know, but i'll say the tools may help transform the NOC role to performance managers and alert central as well.