>The Brexit crisis
It's not a crisis. They didn't want to be a part of bureaucratic corrupt system which never gets anything done for them, takes from the poor of the rich countries and gives it to the rich of the poor countries. They became independent of it now. It's best for everyone, except for the very few who are leeching off of it.
>every child must code
Yes, it's in their interests to have more coders in the market so that they can pay them less... and also in the interest of the government if they don't have to depend on foreign manpower. You don't need to fall for it.
>they hire a small percentage of job applicants for their companies
Why should they hire anyone who is not the best? Specially when hiring the best is not a lot more expensive than hiring an average developer? Let's say you set out to make a new product. Why would you not hire anyone who is the best among the people who are willing to work for you? Also, the world doesn't need everyone to be developers. At some point market will be saturated enough to not be able to pay even the good developers... which is exactly what the tech industry wants and for good reason.
>seem to be making real-world software development more inaccessible to non-experts
No, we don't do that. It is more accessible than ever to non-experts... be it with PaaS or plethora of tools and tutorials and books and other resources available.
>we deride RAD tools and "drag and drop" development
We definitely don't do that without a reason. They have been tried and tested and have failed to deliver in the long term. Changes are difficult to track and building on top of someone else's work is painful.
>ever-more abstract modes of thinking like Functional Programming that a small percentage of working developers, let alone the general public, will grasp
To a non-programmer, Functional Programming makes WAY MORE sense than assignments and looping. Also, we didn't decide to use Functional Programming to exclude out people who have been trained otherwise. We did it because it makes code easier to reason about and scale.
>Is it a labor lottery so that the small percentage of kids who are turn out to be good at coding will become professional programmers?
Yes. A small percent of children who turn out to be good at science class will become professional mathematicians. A small percent of children who turn out to be good at sports will become professional sportsmen. A small percent of children who are good at cooking turn out to become professional chefs. Same with everything. Why should it be different when it comes to programming?
The ONLY thing you need to do is make yourself valuable for someone else so that they are willing to share a part of their income with you. If everyone did the same for themselves, everyone would create value for each other. Unfortunately, people are so much focused on fixing others that they end up harming everyone's lives.