At first we had guilds and craftsmen. We could only produce a few things, their quality was quite low and the products were expensive. This was one of the reasons quality of life was quite bad, actually.

Then we created the assembly line, standardized parts, mass production. Life sucked for the assembly line worker, but everyone else benefited. From a certain point of view even the assembly line worker benefited.

Hand crafting doesn't scale. 1 brilliant coder with in the Lisp Ivory Tower won't ever be able to reproduced the output of 100 decent covers in the Java Middleware Shop. It stands to reason, those decent coders can use their brains and time to test more, implement more kinds of features, talk to customers, colleagues, bosses, maybe even promote their product and do all sorts of things human beings do when they want something (coding is only a minor part of creating a successful product).

Two heads are better than one. And 100 heads that are not at loggerheads are better than two.

But I quite disagree with the "it made our lives better" point, and would say that the efficiency, even with all the standardized language outlook, tooling and methodology is closer to the "9 women getting a baby in 1 month" quip than to Ford's assembly lines.

The part about our life being better is non negotiable, you haven't had to hand wash clothes if you're saying otherwise.

And that's just one example, refrigeration, mass mobility... Life is incomparably better and saying otherwise is just ignoring reality, in my book ;-)