I mean, the calculator is my go to analogy I keep bringing up in this debate.

It lets someone with mediocre long division skills to just do the thing they need to do with fewer steps and less friction.

IDA itself is a tool that helps you decompile code without having to do a lot of things.

knowing long division does not help you make the calculator do division better.

Understanding math absolutely makes a calculator more useful to you though.

and if you work that into the parent's analogy you get the point I was making

Apologies. I misread the comment to which you replied and gave them unwarranted credit for not making the same tired point about calculators.

Should mediocre people be preforming heart surgery?

Lots of mediocre people already are.

It depends. Mediocre doctor in a remote area with right tooling assistance as opposed to no one being available for someone who urgently needs one? Yeah this should be a thing. Should a software bro in NY perform it in dark alley despite having best doctors few blocks away? Maybe not…

I'm sure many 'mediocre' people perform heart surgery. Only 100 years ago, the idea of a person without a certain surname or race, would've been a ghastly preposition, no?

Do you... think heart surgery has become LESS dependent on surgical skill in the last 100 years? Cardiovascular surgeons spend MORE time in training now than they did 100 years ago.

Did heart surgery as we know it exist 100 years ago, or are you trying to conflate things to make a point?

"heart surgery" isn't a technique". Name something, literally anything connected to the profession, and tell me whether the training time is naturally bound to keep going up and up.