What a load of horse shit. No one said design is more important than engineering, rather that software without ux research and design will never be successful in the long run. Look around man, design is the key differentiator. Any engineer can spin up your software in the cloud as a startup and leverage intuitive design to undercut you. You are on hackernews, no one is arguing that engineers are less important than designers. Engineers don't do ethnographic field work to realize how users intuitively prefer to interact with a system in any given industry.

Graphic designers mocking up PSDs are useless. A UX team with designers and researchers are worth their weight in gold and bring immense value to the SDLC by helping the dev teams validate their designs against user mental models early on in the product development life cycle.

And if you think I'm talking out of my ass, here is a voice of authority: Alan Cooper, “Father of Visual Basic," with his book 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum'

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

"The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste huge amounts of money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. They have let the inmates run the asylum. Alan Cooper offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line."

I highly suggest you step off your pedestal and read this book. If not, enjoy creating your architecturally efficient, crappy software that is a pain for actual humans to use.