These are good questions! It may well be that there's an architectural breakthrough out there that will obsolete this whole approach. It's one of very many ways

These are good questions! It may well be that there's an architectural breakthrough out there that will obsolete this whole approach. It's one of very many ways it can fail. Think of it as a hedge, at a societal level. What if we aren't able to come up with a technological breakthrough? After all, software has lagged Moore's law for decades now. I think there's a very real danger in the next few decades that software will get regulated like other fields before it, killing the intrinsically motivated aspect of it entirely. That would be a huge loss to society. We'll have to see how higher levels of the stack develop. I started on this quest building a Lisp, so believe me when I say I can't wait to get to the high-level side of things. There doesn't seem any reason to imagine that we can't have good primitives, grammar and visual representation. My claim is merely that in addition to these interface properties the implementation for them is also important. And it gets short shrift in the conventional narrative. That said, let's imagine that there's a strong case that we need to give up parser generators (or something similarly high-level) in order to give everybody the ability to understand their computers. I'd take that trade in a heartbeat.