[vvanders]

There's nothing intrinsic to graphics work there, you're just talking about content-driven development which is common in a bunch of domains.

Your not hitting the black-screen since you've been doing it self-admitted for 20 years. Kudos, good for you.

The problem is getting fresh-blood in who have a hunger to learn but don't have a deep understanding of shaders, pipelines, vertices, etc. It's really easy to make a trivial mistake in that boiler plate(I've seen someone fight something for hours until they thought to turn of culling, they just had their winding wrong).

Case in point from one of the foremost figures in the domain:

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/370205518532329472

PIX was about the most sane step in the direction of fixing this, sadly tools seem to have slid backwards of late.