> I don't disagree but the idea of equating software development with some sort of artistry also allows the existence of the 10x programmer as, you know, a more gifted artists. [...] The most horrendous application I ever worked on was a java servlet app where the original developers didn't understand thread safety.

The knowledge of thread safety is not an inborn thing nor issue of talent. It is literally issue of knowledge that you can acquire if you previously did not had it.

And companies can get away with bad code for quite a long.