AAA game studios spending tens of millions of dollars on extremely complex game engines. The rendering part of it is significant but not nearly the largest part of it. You can take the Unreal Engine 4 for a spin now for just $20, and you'll see the incredible engineering feat that it is, and that's just the core engine. Almost every AAA title is an engineering marvel the industry as a whole can be proud of.
Demoscene demos can be brilliant and intricate, but they are just tricks in comparison.
I'm not expert on database technology, but it is a field worth millions in investments no doubt. Yes, open source technology is giving the big corps a run for their money, but you can't be seriously thinking CouchDB comes even close to the breadth of features and business solutions Oracle offers its customers.
I'm not an IC designer either, but have you ever seen a graphics card run Linux? FPGA's and GPU's can't do what CPU's do, and there's good reasons for it, again these products just don't compare in complexity. Besides, Intel's CPU's nowadays integrate GPUs that can render a mean scene.
So I'm not sure what your point is anymore. In my opinion these are not the plumbers, these are the ones designing the new materials and techniques that enable the plumbers to do their thing.
When we bought the house, the inspection said that there was an "undetermined" leak somewhere. There had been kind of a rotten egg smell the last few weeks (hydrogen sulfide) so I decided to crawl underneath and take a look. The pipe from our kitchen sink had what looked like stalactites hanging from it, so I took a wire brush to one and when we tried running the water, a six inch wide waterfall cascaded down. So first I bought a bunch of PVC at the hardware store, then realized I needed a special Y connector with a nut on the end that plumbers use to snake bad clogs (that isn’t made for PVC). So went back, returned it all for ABS, and then spent about 4 hours cutting the galvanized pipe ends with a dremel and using a special shielded rubber junction to connect everything up. It was grueling, exhausting work. I would have threaded the ABS into the old fittings, but they were cast iron and remarkably use a kind of lead paste to merge with the galvanized pipe (besides, cast iron rusts around plastic so it can’t be threaded that way). When I pulled the old pipes out into the yard, one of them had a six foot split running down the length of it. Our kitchen sink and dishwasher had been dumping directly onto the ground for years. We never even knew.
Compare this with programming and the similarities are uncanny. We are dealing with remarkably over engineered systems to, well, move bits of stuff around. Where it once made sense to melt lead around a pipe that was designed to last 50 years, today anyone can glue two ends of plastic together that lasts basically forever. The aging infrastructure of TCP, DNS, Apache, UNIX, etc creates millions of jobs but costs us incalculably by making us think we need a blowtorch when a brush and a little glue does a better job.
I really feel that my passion for understanding the intricacies of programming died the day I learned php and realized that the vast majority of it isn’t necessary. No amount of well structured code or best practices can make up for the humbling truth that if computers were better at doing what we wanted, then programming wouldn’t be necessary. In the 90s, it took me 12 pages of C++ code to create a window in Mac OS and draw “hello, world”, but today I can do it in 12 characters of HTML. I’m not sure I even care anymore what language I’m using - if it takes more than a one liner to accomplish a common task, then I feel the precious moments of my life being drained away. The code is a distraction from the goal I’m trying to accomplish.
Every day, as I thread that next piece of galvanized code into place, knowing full well that it not only WILL fail, but in unpredictable ways at some unknown point in the future, I wonder when and how it will all end. I sometimes think to myself that maybe it needs to end, like maybe I should be focussing more on inventing plastic than plumbing.
Everywhere I look, I see examples of epic failure: AAA game studios spending $10 million dollars on games with graphics bested by ray marching in Demoscene, or Oracle investing millions on database technology that will be supplanted by things like CouchDB, or Intel spending billions on incrementally better chips than can’t hold a candle to even the cheapest video cards or FPGAs. Only it’s not failure, because they are making money. There is so much money in plumbing!