You're mostly right - people are using it as an excuse. But the cheaper equipment gets, the more people can dabble in the field. Five or ten years down the road

You're mostly right - people are using it as an excuse. But the cheaper equipment gets, the more people can dabble in the field. Five or ten years down the road, a small percentage of those people will be the high caliber talent. So while finding talented people is still the bottleneck, I think as a long term trend, the move to digital and effect of Moore's law is going to help with that as well (as long as the person looking is also talented). There were a hell of a lot less programmers when you had to buy time on a mainframe. Or scribes back in the Roman Empire. Think of all of the amazing works of art or literature that were never created because the tools (literally, paper) were beyond the means of average citizens.