I think there is space for both.

You have your "not an engineer" people who have built airplanes, cars, motorcycles and whatnot. They are good with their tools and they are able to make amazing things. Some of them might even be doing these things for a living.

Then you get your "real" engineers who need to measure and test and spec out and define limits and must be able to provably demonstrate that the bridge will not fall over.

In software you have your journeymen who build software for a living, they are good at what they do and they are building amazing things, and then you have your "engineers" who are building avionics for rockets and planes, the control software for nuclear reactors and so on. They need to prove their software works as intended and cannot venture beyond it's parameters etc.

Two very different professions, two very different types of people, yet both are (on the surface) doing something that appears very similar.

Any definition of engineering which excludes the Wright brothers and James Watt, who _invented the machine that gives the field it's name_ is a fairly poor definition. If you're creating something in a poorly understood situation by applying rules of thumb, you're doing engineering. Depending on what you are doing, flying by the seat of your pants might be really poor engineering practice, or you might be doing cutting edge work that people will be studying decades from now. Those rules of thumb might be a result of personal trial and error, or you might be getting them from a detailed technical manual. It just depends on what the state of the art is, the maturity of the field, etc.