Please stop accusing everyone of being biased and having an agenda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since everyone is biased and has an agenda (including you), but the way you're saying it makes it sound like you think it's an important component of other people's comments but not yours.
Ok first of all. There is no universal law that says everyone has to be biased and have an agenda. There's no logic to it. This false notion comes from the fact that most people (not all) people are biased and that when people are biased they are unaware of it. However this does not mean that people can't be unbiased or have no agenda.
Second: Examine the sentence in reference to that phrase. It is literally word for word referring to "engineering" and Not a specific set of engineering projects.
Literally what you are doing is inserting your own opinion onto what that "engineering" is referring to and I am taking it at face value. So I am not wrong when I say that your observations are biased. There is no accusation here, just observation of events.
Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Have you taken into account everyone's wishes, desires, needs, analyzed every possible scenario in existence according to some yet-unspecified objective reasoning system? Then you are biased. You are missing something, you are concluding something erroneously. (using the generic you as a stand-in for anyone)
Your agenda is to incorporate a pixel-level API into the web. And that's okay. Mine is to prevent the web into devolving into an opaque black box. That's okay too.
As to the topic at hand, I won't try dissecting comments word for word, because I think this is a loss of time and devolves into a lot of who-said-what, when we can sidestep it by concentrating on the most charitable explanation.
Reading through the thread again, I think the other poster's point was that there are many situations (not all) where designing things in the simplest and most direct way, using HTML as the semantic underpinning, leads to both less engineering effort and to a more accessible design.
Specifically, I do not think he was arguing doubling or tripling a movie budget in order to make another similar movie for blind people. But then again, we weren't talking about movies. We were talking about web sites, in which the loss of HTML would lead to a net loss compared to what we have now.
