What, you think you are entitled to fiddle with specs or schedules after a certain age?
I have been an authoritative expert in Lisp, PDP-11 assembler, 86k assembler, Unix device drivers (back when it was AT&T Unix), Mac programming (original Mac OS), distributed COM applications, and .NET (which never even got off the ground before I moved on). Now I'm working on Apache-centric distributed apps with various lanagues depending on the server, client, OS, etc.
I have started and sold companies and am fairly comfortably well-off, but I'm still not immune to learning someting new every 9-18 months. I have reached a elevl where I join startups and sometimes invest in them as an "angel." But I still code. I hire well because I can do whatever the people I'm hiring will do. I don't expect this to change until I score big enough to race J boats and vintage cars full time.
That's just life. You could have picked dentistry or a mortuary trade.
In a number of cases it would have been better for my employer if I had been allowed to generate more code in fewer languages than much less codes in lots of different languages.
I agree that we need to learn, but what I have learned in terms of program management, requirement analysis & specification, and tool selection is as important (if not more so) than learning yet another syntax because it is supposed to be the be-all-and-end-all.
Architects are now capable of creating very sophisticated and elaborate structures because they build on skills and methods developed over centuries. We continue to build half-baked and mediocre applications because we are constantly reinventing the wheel, and then having the newbies push it around.
That probably went well with the TPA-70. You probably know DCL (Dec Command Lanquage) and worked on a uVAX (like I did). High IQ people huh ??? You mean like ... Mensans (like me again)