I think that is what we are really asking here. And I think we are a long way from that. Of course I, like everyone else who reads this blog, am biased.

These people (managers, CEOs, users) are effectively children. They want their instant gratification YESTERDAY and dont care about how we do it because to them, its a game. Its all colors and screens and graphics and sounds and its really: playing. Isnt it? We just play around on the computer all day.

The REAL problem lies with us: the developers. We allow these jackasses to treat us as they do. We should all, collectively, sit back for a couple of says and watch these companies fall apart as their know-it-all managers attempt to write this EASY code.

I have zero respect for people who insist that our job is easy. Some projects ARE simple. Most arent. And I refuse to deliver code on their schedule because it is always way too short. Think ahead middle managers. Lack of planning on your part IS NOT an emergency on mine.

FWIW, I want to move towards the Star Trek “Computer: write me a program that does X” model. Or maybe the Star Wars model where the programs write themselves.

I’m in between. I don’t think *everything* should be easy. But when and where we can, we should move towards abstracting stuff away so we can focus on more important things.

D&D is nothing but an abstraction. Whether it’s the *right* abstraction is certainly open to debate. But the industry has already agreed that abstraction is good, or else we wouldn’t have operating systems, programming languages, compilers, etc.

So by all means, let’s have a discussion about whether particular forms of D&D development are useful abstractions, or cause more trouble than they’re worth. But can we skip the blanket statements maybe?