A craft can be extremely hard while useful output from it is relatively easy to obtain. Case in point, I used to be a very serious baker. I mean, very serious.

A craft can be extremely hard while useful output from it is relatively easy to obtain. Case in point, I used to be a very serious baker. I mean, very serious. It started when I was a child. I made sure I understood things at a molecular level, cared about first principles, redid techniques thousands of times, spent hours on the craft in every axis imaginable. And yet people who baked ten times a year sometimes made better cookies than I did. A friend once made a better carrot cake than mine because she didn't waste time trying to figure out how to "bring depth to carrots." and the many ways of modifying textures. She just picked a very good recipe and had the tastebuds to know it's good enough to make for people. That didn't mean she understood baking better than I did. If something went wrong, I usually knew why and what to do about it. If someone gave me direction and wild requests, I could get us there, meanwhile she could not. If things didn't work out, her solution was more likely to be "find another recipe"... and finally, the part that "validates" the ego of bakers, if you looked at everything we both made, I'm sure mine was better on average. BUT... if what people actually value is "who made a great carrot cake tonight?", then yes, baking is easy. All she had to do was find a recipe detailed enough for her and apply it without majorly messing up. I think that's what the "coding was never the hard part" argument is getting at. The fact that programming has difficulty that people spend decades mastering it, or that the best programmers can do things ordinary programmers cannot does not tell you how much of that depth is actually required to produce the software people value. Which is, tbh, very little. Anyway, I could spread this analogy further but this is long as it is so I will stop here. It just reminded me of when people accused me of "just knowing how to pick a good recipe" as a way of reducing my development efforts, and it made me laugh.