Hardly any of us are working on Postgres, Photoshop, blender, etc. but it's not just cope to wish we were.
It's good to think about the needs to business and the needs of society separately. Yes, the thing needs users, or no one is benefiting. But it also needs to do good for those users, and ultimately, at the highest caliber, craftsmanship starts to matter again.
There are legitimate reasons for the startup ecosystem to focus firstly and primarily on getting the users/customers. I'm not arguing against that. What I am arguing is why does the industry need to be dominated by startups in terms of the bulk of the products (not bulk of the users). It begs the question of how much societally-meaningful programming waiting to be done.
I'm hoping for a world where more end users code (vibe or otherwise) and the solve their own problems with their own software. I think that will make more a smaller, more elite software industry that is more focused on infrastructure than last-mile value capture. The question is how to fund the infrastructure. I don't know except for the most elite projects, which is not good enough for the industry (even this hypothetical smaller one) on the whole.
