Another advantage of the modern development tools ("lowering the bar for
developers", as the Microsoft guy phrased it) is that making the tools
easier to use means that expensive, highly-talented, programmers can be
supplemented (replaced?) with cheaper programmers. While this sounds
nefarious, it's not any different than the way the building trades have
moved in the last hundred years - there was a time when your carpenter was
also your architect and you paid highly for his skills. Now the architect
is highly specialized, expensive, and not as common in single-family
dwelling construction; the guy who hammers nails is barely trained, cheap,
and ubiquitous.