And business is, imho, not just "for profit", but society in general. I feel about it similar as I feel about wood working mastery. Creating incredible joints with extreme attention to detail and a lot of experience fascinates me. But to build furniture for more than one person a year, I'd prefer nails, power tools and a bunch of people that are experienced enough not to nail parts of their body to the wood.

If we want to provide something to the masses, we'll have to provide something that can be used by the masses, not just by a highly trained elite. PHP is mass production development. It's not necessarily elegant (though you can do a lot in it, it doesn't have to be as messy as WP is), but it gets the job done AND it empowers large groups by being easy to learn and not requiring advanced understanding before you can actually achieve something with it.

I do still believe that we want experts that do the kind of work you're describing though. But I believe they shouldn't distance themselves from the ordinary people, but instead find their elegant solutions and then give them a handle so that the uninitiated can use them. Tooling is leverage, individually but even more so collectively. Imho, if you're a brilliant computer scientist and you work on "normal" real world problems, you're wasting your talent. Even if you find the greatest thing that runs 100 times as fast as the previous one, you've sped up one thing out of a million. Instead, build something that'll enable normal people to speed up their projects by factor two, your impact will be immeasurable.

I think that that's also a good point. It makes me wonder about the useful limits of abstraction if accessibility (broadly defined) is the goal.