Your career seems very similar to mine, I've somewhat recanted on visual designers too, having recently been maintaining some old desktop winforms/c# apps. I th

Your career seems very similar to mine, I've somewhat recanted on visual designers too, having recently been maintaining some old desktop winforms/c# apps. I think you're being somewhat rose tinted though, those designers could and did shit all over your code from time to time, merging could be a huge headache too. I still find the middle ground of hand typed code + a decent UI library (Qt, Gtk, maybe swing, etc) to be the best middle ground for productivity. I find it both productive enough in the short term and productive in the long term because it encourages componentization and doesn't encourage spaghetti code in click handlers. Unfortunately we've mostly seen a transition form visual designers to xml/html and that is a step backwards.