>If, however, there is much more concern around how the cookware is organized in the kitchen, or which brand of vegetable oil should be bought, that has almost no tangible benefits to the person eating the meal.

I think you are only looking at one side of the multiplier effect. Yes, organizing cookware does not prepare food, but have you ever tried to cook when all your tools are in a drawer, piled together? Design leads implementation and implementation gives substance to design. Valuing one over the other is like saying a car's engine is more important than it's gas pedal.

So, why not have specialized workers? It makes sense to me that the people who don't understand the needs of the average user would be the perfect people to have slog through the mess of poorly designed APIs that pretty much every project ever will have to deal with at some point.