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"Oh gee, people were so much more talented when they had to build a chair by hand rather than run a whole factory of chair building machines. If only those modern programmers working on LCH/ATLAS had the chops to compute some moon landing trajectories."

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I would say on the whole, yes - that is actually true. Now you only need one "smart" person to program up the machinery, whereas in the past you did need multiple skilled craftsmen in a variety of roles - not exactly apples vs apples, but I think that one of the unfortunate side effects of too much specialization is a lack of a broad knowledge base that lets you apply skills from one field in a different area.

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