I don't think you've actually responded to my argument, or any argument I would be likely to make. I am not in favor of licensure for software developers and feel like I've said as much on many occasions.

I'd like to give you a dozen paragraphs in response to your rebuttal, but unfortunately I don't need them to refute you. All I have to say is "none of this makes what we do engineering".

We are not engineers. We have none of the guardrails serious engineering has. We normally make decisions in an almost complete absence of consideration for safety, reliability, and security. Buildings erected millennia ago stand today, doing what buildings generally do, and even throughout the worst of the industrial disasters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, buildings generally managed to keep themselves upright. Nobody suggests that civil and mechanical and structural engineering haven't progressed since then, didn't address vital safety problems, and didn't formalize their respective disciplines. They obviously did. But that's essentially the claim you're making about software. Just because planes don't routinely fall out of the sky doesn't mean we're not in the Triangle Shirtwaist era of software development