I wasn't really dissing UX or frontends, that wasn't my intent. It's more about the approaches than validity of these fields. I'll illustrate what I mean by le

I wasn't really dissing UX or frontends, that wasn't my intent. It's more about the approaches than validity of these fields. I'll illustrate what I mean by less features on desktop application. 30 years ago, there was a text editor called Ami Pro. You as a user were completely free to redefine its UI. You could also define keyboard shortcuts. Today, people use, say, Google Docs which doesn't have these features. Users are supposed to use common UX, designed by experts. But which one had better UX, really? I mean it's easy to say that medieval people built huts and now we build skyscrapers, and so the technology brought undeniable progress. But they also built cathedrals (note I am NOT using "cathedral" here in contrast with "bazaar"). Skyscraper building techniques don't really help you build cathedrals faster, because one of the attraction of the cathedral is that each of them is heavily customized and unique. The problem is, since it's easier to build skyscrapers with the same amount of material, nobody wants to build a cathedral anymore. And it's perhaps a loss. I was pointing out the cathedrals of software do exist, built with perhaps cruder tools, but more actual business logic and features. So in some strange way, having more productive tools to build applications also boxed our thinking into how things should be done, and I don't think it has to be that way. (Another perspective is that a medieval church used to be a sort of communal project more than a skyscraper is today. Commercial software used to be lot more moddable 20 or 40 years ago than it is today - MVS is a nice example. And out of these modding capabilities many features have been built - often by users - that would never make business sense today.)