One of the (really sad) reasons I suspect is behind a lot of these practices - like pointless wrappers and pointless genericization - is that nobody will pay yo

One of the (really sad) reasons I suspect is behind a lot of these practices - like pointless wrappers and pointless genericization - is that nobody will pay you to "understand something". You have to produce something, even if you don't quite understand what it is you're supposed to be producing. Sure, you can spend an hour reading a horribly written-by-committee "requirements document", but you had better be producing something that looks like a program by the end of the day. Since admitting that you don't quite yet "get" the DB layer is a fast-track to the unemployment line, some developers have learned to buy time by creating meaningless abstraction layers while they're trying to figure out the inner details of OAuth or Cassandra or whatever else was supposed to be "saving us time".