[sweetsocks21]

I think you're correct in this assessment. I've recently switched from many years of low-level programming, doing real time animation/graphics into the large scale SaaS world.

The things these two camps of software engineers care about are completely different. In the SaaS world it's all about interfacing between systems and managing complex business processes. There's often a lot of organization/political problems, along with auditing and legal requirements. There seems to be a lot more emphasis on developer productivity than end user performance.

Not that these engineers don't care about performance, but their tolerances are much higher. For example 100-200ms turn around is entirely acceptable, or even fast, in the SaaS world. While in my previous job that was absurdly slow, and unacceptable.

I think another under appreciated thing is that the scale and complexity is truly larger today than yesteryear. Even in real time graphics, Unreal Engine incorporates literally decades of cutting edge research into a framework that a new game programmer can start running with in hours. There's the various platforms like mobile, PC/Mac/Linux, graphics APIs like DX12, Metal, Vulcan, multiplayer syncing, animation, model importing, etc etc. There's just so many more things to support these days that there's going to be some slippage.

And each of these new tools and platforms were made with the intention of doing something better than a previous one, but then the real world creeps in and here we are.

It would be great to see more effort and research into rethinking from the base level, maybe even hardware, of how we can simplify this entire software stack and have our cake and eat it too.