I disagree too. I've tried many a time over the years to do good front-end work (especially where web apps are concerned), and I've concluded that I suck at it

I disagree too. I've tried many a time over the years to do good front-end work (especially where web apps are concerned), and I've concluded that I suck at it. Really. The things I find appealing are entirely orthogonal to the rest of the world, especially that cool school of UX engineers. I'm generally content with synchronous http requests, and adding Ajax is always an afterthought. As a result, I stopped making crap websites for people. I started making nice backends, and who doesn't love a nice backend(?). Everyone (especially me) is a lot happier when I'm not breaking the look and feel of a site/app/application/product, and I'm a lot happier when I don't have to care how it looks. I'll provide an API, and some other person can make it look good. That's the way the world works. Asking everyone to be a full-stack engineer is a nice pipe dream, but consider the same in other professions. You'd be asking neurosurgeons to know the same level of detail as dermatologists, and vice versa. You'd be asking a Professor of Particle Physics to understand tertiary protein folding (as his biological counterpart might). There is no such thing as "overspecialisation", only oversimplification of the job at hand.