The largest reason software development costs a lot is that a cabal of people had been desperately trying to lock out smaller companies from having access to so

The largest reason software development costs a lot is that a cabal of people had been desperately trying to lock out smaller companies from having access to software engineering resources at such a cheap rate and eventually get taken out. I get that from another perspective your answer is also correct, but the reality is the large pay is really so that EA's blockbuster video game sells and a small upstart of 45 software people that want to make their own amazing game does not beat them. Those 45 people will take the paycheck rather than collectively start a game company now. What happens next no one is sure, but I can tell you, that if the amount of cheap software surfaces because 1 man army companies take out TeamViewer, Photoshop, Jira, etc... because of LLMs - then those wages will drop, and drop fast and it has nothing to do with the 330 million people "having a say".