> There would be no reason to presuppose that it would be better: Sure there, it's been said multiple times; those still writing software would be the smartest

> There would be no reason to presuppose that it would be better: Sure there, it's been said multiple times; those still writing software would be the smartest around. That alone is reason enough to think the overall quality would be higher; if you don't believe that, then imho you don't know what overall (average) means. You're not listening, you're focusing on outliers and I'm taking about the mean. It's a valid logical inference that if you weed out less intelligent developers by making developing harder, that the average quality goes up; not the absolute quality, the average, mostly because you'd be weeding out tons of bad developers who write tons of bad software. This really isn't debatable, it's logic. Weeding out the bad raises the average quality, there's nothing to argue here, that's just a fact.