You know, I wonder to what extent it's more the peripheral hassles than the actual abstractions. There's no way in hell I'd be a programmer if it meant working with punch cards; it'd be above my irritation threshold. There might be a lot of people out there who would enjoy programming, but installing and configuring a compiler and editor, for instance, are simply too frustrating/boring to them.
There weren't many photographers when you had to develop your own film. (I think I'm paraphrasing a Steve Yegge essay... I'd look it up if I weren't on my iPhone at a volleyball tournament :p )
where did you get that phraseology? Sounds like NLP.
That and general semantics I believe. I haven't read much of the primary works in either (yet), but picked up some of the concepts/terms from Robert Anton Wilson.
Either way, the point is the same: 90% of people (if not 99%) are averse to the kind of abstraction we're talking about. I have no idea how many are unable and how many merely unwilling; I'm not even sure the distinction matters or how you go about deciding it. (By the way, where did you get that phraseology? It sounds like NLP.)
Same goes for actors and boxers and cops. This seems, almost tautologically, true of any industry. Why is this meme so prevalent?
It's because the demand for programs vastly exceeds the supply of good programmers, which is the fundamental theorem of software economics (at least in our lifetime) and skews everything about the industry. Obviously the mediocre outnumber the competent at any activity, but that usually doesn't become the dominant fact about that activity. For example, there are many more bad musicians than good ones, but the demand for music doesn't vastly exceed the supply of good musicians. If it did, Lord knows what sorts of contraptions people would call instruments and mass-distribute. "We can't have pianos around here - how will we hire 100 musicians to play them in the future? And if guitars are so great, how come they're not more popular? Better to be a blubby-music-box shop like everybody else! Our clients expect it!"