[joshyeager]

Your last sentence is exactly right. There are significant benefits to building a profession that is predictable and well-defined. Ensuring a reasonable lower bound reduces the risk of failure significantly.

The open questions are 1) whether it's possible to do that, and 2) whether it's possible to do that without inadvertently imposing an upper bound. Common wisdom among software developers is that it is not possible and even if it was it would impose a very tight upper bound. But as far as I know, that common wisdom is just guess work. No one has found a good solution yet, but there's also no proof that there is not one. That's why so many people continue to try.