> It's just that you get a lot of "coding is a thing I have to do in order to get to some target", and so people think that once they've finally bashed out their spreadsheet, they've figured it all out.

I have a friend who wrote a 641-line long bash script to automate a web site. It doesn't use subroutines anywhere, the body for the program is a 550 line long loop with multiple if statements and loops inside it.

He thinks the program is maintainable and easy to understand because he didn't have particular difficulty writing it.