[latexr]

> Quality went down at every step along the abstraction train

Hard disagree. Abstraction by itself does not correlate with declining quality, you can be a very competent developer working in a high level language, or a crappy developer working in low level languages.

[pwillia7]

That's too narrowly scoped and it's not a neg on the people. If you write CSS code all day, there's no reason/benefit to understand EE. It's easier for me to think about giant old wooden ships and how that knowledge got lost/replaced at we built modern navy ships. Find me someone to caulk a boat with Oakum today for instance.