> But nobody likes to pay extra, so why not make designers code?

From the other side of the aisle, this isn't what happened.

I want to preface this by saying that in general I like designers, but there are things about your good friends that you find annoying and tease them about. So now for some teasing.

What happened was that a bunch of up-in-the-clouds designers kept denigrating (directly or by omission) developers in front of their bosses and we got tired of it. The response to "why can't you guys figure this out? It's really simple" was "Well if you're so smart why don't you implement it?"

Constructively, that translates to engineering the situation so the designers felt our pain. But on a particularly bad day the sentiment tended to be more like "choke on it."