I’m sympathetic to looking down on the obsession with money. But there’s something deep and important about the monetary element. Engineering is about solving real-world, practical problems. The cost is a real factor in whether a potential solution is a useful one.

I think the money question is a red herring here. I’d phrase it more like: what problem in a user’s problem space is expressible only like this? And if the only user is the programmer, that’s alright, but feels more aligned with pure academia. That’s important, too! But has a much smaller audience than engineering at large.