What if creating software is closer to investigative journalism than to building bridges? Consider this, a small subset of professions falls under the umbrella of engineering. There are chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers etc. There are no sports engineers, law engineers, or literature engineers. Some people activities are just not engineerable. This doesn't make them any less important, so I deeply disagree with "programming cheapens engineering" statement.
And it's not that software is a novel concept. In fact, the very argument that software is new and is not yet properly regulated is becoming old. Software is older than spaceflight, computer tomography, and mobile telecommunications, - all heavily if not excessively regulated.
Somehow, creating software dodges most of the attempts to make it into an engineering discipline. Somehow, most of the norms and rules we invent don't pass the test of time. There is the SWEBoK, there are also ISO standards for computer languages, and their use, but the art of programming still remains orthogonal to the standardization effort. Most of the software outside safety-critical systems is still created by artisans and not engineers. And... it's ok. Maybe you don't need a license to write a yet another dating app.
So maybe software engineering is indeed a misnomer. Like a racoon dog, a guinea pig, or MTV.