Certification is much better than licensing, because one can always choose to ignore certification, or shop around for the best certifications. This, in turn, is important because licensing and certification both sometimes fail utterly to accurately reflect someone's capabilities -- which means that sometimes you're better off avoiding the licensed or certified individual in favor of someone else who doesn't have the same license or certification but knows his or her shit better and more thoroughly. In the case of a licensed industry, though, you're not allowed to make that kind of decision for yourself.

> the difference between e.g. a Software Engineer (certified) and a programmer is abundantly obvious to anyone to anyone who does the research?

What difference is there objectively between 'a certified software engineer' and 'a programmer' ?