By that light, the artist that is painting using store-bought pigments instead of hand made, or brushing paints instead of reallocating molecules, or even better, atoms, is also using a black box.

I think OP has a point, and is about guiding the design, then overall structure and dynamic of the code. Nobody expects to write in Assembler or not using libraries, but making a concious decision on the design.

I have met few programmers, but many coders. For them coding is a job, and generally they don’t care about overall architecture, algorithm efficiency, and code elegance is limited to syntax-coloring-themes in their editor. I respect their existence, but generally they are building on top off somobody else’s effort.