I do sympathize with the argument (I've made it myself, in the past), but ... ... the problem with that is there are a lot of damned smart people who are good

I do sympathize with the argument (I've made it myself, in the past), but ... ... the problem with that is there are a lot of damned smart people who are good at what they're good at precisely because they view "wrangling tech" as a complete waste of their time. Artists and musicians are a really good example, and are the key reason I use Twitter (pretty much the entire indie game industry lives on that platform), but this principle also extends to doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers, historians, practically everyone in all the sciences, trades, and humanities ... except computer programmers. I've had aspirations towards being a polymath, and one of the bitter things I've learned about the programming-autodidact death march is how much of what someone learns isn't important fundamental knowledge, but is just byzantine details that will evaporate half a decade later when the software in question goes obsolete. It's excruciating to waste time learning something like that (which will become worthless) when I could be learning core programming fundamentals -- or could be learning something in a different field like drawing that will stay valid for the rest of my life. I was a desktop developer looking-in-from-the-outside at web development, and I timed my entry into the field specifically to avoid the hot mess that was the API differences between netscape (yes, Netscape Communicator 4.5) and IE 6 at the time. As a programmer with enough of a nose for bad code smell, I took one look at that and thought to myself "this is completely insane." I could have knuckled down, busted the books and gotten all those api minutiae down just pat. Just in time for jQuery (or future browser versions) to show up and render them irrelevant forever. It wasn't insane because it was a mess - it was insane because it was definitely going to go away, and soon. And once it did go away all the time I'd spent learning and mastering it would have been utterly wasted, sure - but wasted at the expense of not doing something else that's more important. That's time I could have spent learning the piano. Or a foreign language. Now - not all programming is like that - eventually you've gotta bite the bullet and decide something's "good enough to get the job done". Many tech stacks actually end up in a nice sweet spot where they're coherent enough to learn quickly, and stable enough (in the sense of an API) to get out of the way and let you approach long-term projects without the ground shifting under your feet. But if you just blindly vacuum up proficiencies as they come off the treadmill you'll quickly discover you're doing nothing else with your life. -- This is the relation most humans have with tech. Especially the smart ones who are really into something else. It's a means to an end - and can work wonderful magic. But it demands a price.