It doesn't help that "Technical Writer" is now an incredibly rare job title, it was one of the first in a long line of specializations that were pushed on to ge

It doesn't help that "Technical Writer" is now an incredibly rare job title, it was one of the first in a long line of specializations that were pushed on to general developers. As you mentioned, they were never allocated the extra time but also don't have the training and experience that technical writers once did. It was also a very poor target for outsourcing. The specializations common on a team even 20 years ago was much closure to the "Surgical Team" model from the mythical man month than what we have today.