I agree with you to a degree. I think there are more systems programmers and people who work on performance-sensitive applications than you're implying, but I

I agree with you to a degree. I think there are more systems programmers and people who work on performance-sensitive applications than you're implying, but I also think that there's really no such thing as a generic programmer anymore; everyone's specialized into their own domain and programmers from different domains have trouble understanding each other's needs, or understanding why the things they find essentially important are largely ignored by programmers in different domains. We all have a finite number of things that we can be experts in, so we tend to focus on the things that are right in front of us.