Hmm... I'd be curious as to why you are asking such questions to start with? Seemed a little unrelated to my original post. Anyway, to answer one of your questions:

>Why do you think deep focused work is a race to the bottom?

Let me side side step and answer this question tangentially. Recently I came across a post that mentioned that a potential noble prize winner was doing the work of a bus driver. I'm not in the league of this person nor are most programmers. But the overall theme is that any work that generally confines you to high degree on non-interactivity with other people and/or is not sufficiently understood will mean that you will loose out on being see as sufficiently useful or valuable from the point of view of (the non-technical) management.

This seems like a problem you can solve, though, by actually interacting with your coworkers and manager and demonstrating the value of what you do. What's keeping you from doing that?