[wpietri]

You seem to have two arguments here: training people up and short-term economics. The former is irrelevant to your point. Yes, if you have junior people, it's good to find things for them to do that are at their skill level. But that doesn't mean that there's no high-skill way to do the same work.

I don't think the short-term economic perspective really means much in the long term. Sure, if you spend $6x automating something a junior person can do for $5x, then your apparent extra cost is $x. But that's only true if a) the problem never comes up again, and b) no problem particularly like that one comes up again. Given the history of our field, that sounds like a poor bet to me.