I don't think craftsmanship is dead, but I do think we've built a lemon economy.

The thing that creates the lemon markets is that you can't really distinguish quality until after purchase. This is extra hard with software because the average population is tech illiterate. It's even hard to distinguish when people are tech literate (and not all of HN is). Same thing with cars, most people can't tell the difference, so they buy based on price.

We kinda did this to ourselves. We pushed everything online and killed all the stores. Remember when no one would buy anything online because how risky it was? Then they created "free returns, no questions asked" and people would buy a few things and then send it back? That gave a store like feel with the convenience of home. So everyone moved online, the stores struggled to keep up, the Internet retailers kept running in the red (just like physical stores), the physical stores died, then the online sites needed to get a profit, so free returns stopped or diminished (or drove up the cost of goods. Yay arbitrage! It's like paying for credit card fees when you pay with cash \o/). So now everything is just worse.

We do similar things everywhere. We've started running the whole economy this way. By looking at it through a spreadsheet. Data is great, don't get me wrong, I'm an incredibly mathy person myself, but these are just proxies. To do good data analysis you also need to see beyond the math. To see where the proxy measurement isn't perfectly aligned with the desired measurement. How the measurement[0] can mislead you.

  > "what I need for my usage"

[0] all measurements are proxies. You can't measure anything directly. No, you can't measure a meter. You can measure a comparison to a meter stick. You can measure the time of flight of a laser. You can do all sorts of things like that but everything is always a proxy. If you think this just matters for high precision, well... just look at any house.

[1] an incredibly talented third party could get you exactly to where you need but now you've just doubled the people working

More like a lemon tree economy. We can still talk about which trees to pick in order to not get lemons.