I’d risk saying that the technical choices most of us here are challenged with are close to the ones Linus faces than to what .theprodukkt deals with in their d

I’d risk saying that the technical choices most of us here are challenged with are close to the ones Linus faces than to what .theprodukkt deals with in their demos. Irrespective of technical merit, I’d call those of us in the Linus camp “software engineers” but not the demo scene people (whose output is art rather than engineering). Similarly, the people making game engines are software engineers while the people making games with them are (probably) not, even if they spend just as much time programming. There’s many roles where your day-to-day work is largely composed of writing code, but only some particular specialisms put robustness and long term maintainability at the top of their priority list. Just because many individual engineers suck at that side of the job doesn’t change the job description.