not sure I agree with your 'wants' at the end, but I do want to frame the earlier paragraphs. I feel that pain too. Fred Brooks thought we'd largely have eliminated accidental complexity by now [0]. The "out of the tar pit" paper [1] tackles that and shows it's hard.

But if anything, accidental complexity has got worse. Go back 30 years and a useful command-line tool could reasonably be coded in a single .c file, compiled in a single command, then run.

Now: full-stack web apps are a lot more complex than command line tools. But, with contemporary tooling, the accidental complexity has scaled at least linearly, probably worse. Just setting up a front end dev environment is a lesson in complexity theory. And then there's manually crafting the UI-to-service messaging, k8s deployment templates, build pipeline, and all the other tasks that have nothing directly to do with the actual functional requirements.

I don't know what the answer is. Per other posts in the thread, I don't think it comes from conflating "0 to expert in 12 hours!" with "productive tools for skilled and experienced users". Low/no code fits into the former category (and maybe has a place, I don't have an opinion there). I don't see much addressing the latter space.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet [1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/raw/master/...