[MarkusQ]

To be honest, I had the same reaction when I started using high-level languages. I wasn't touching the metal (certainly not as much as I had been when solving problems sometimes involved things like repurposing unused bits on a multiplexed bus talk to a new peripheral) and it somehow felt less real. But pretty quickly the range of problems I was addressing shifted, and everything clicked back into focus. I'd never _really_ been touching the metal and I always had been (and still was) in touch with it. Ditto giving up stick shift. And I imagine at some point artists felt the same thing when they transitioned to commercially prepared oil paint.

[lelele]

This. The mental shift resembles the one away from machine language, then away from assembly, then away from C... But programmers who still knew how things worked at lower levels had an edge on others.