Isn't the craft part harder than the art part though? Far too much craftless art out there imo.
To non-software people the syntax is what seems impossibly hard and in their view writing a software that works, reliably is what should be easy. The truth is just the opposite. So to non-software people, someone writing Hello World in brainfuck would seem crazier than someone writing a good piece of software that solves a hard problem.
So judging the craft can be hard if you are not doing the craft yourself. A painter like Picasso could draw completely realistic at age 19 and spent the following decades doing more abstract things. Not because the realistic stuff was hard and he was lazy, but quite the other way around. Writing a complicated program with obscure syntax and many million lines is possible, but it takes a true master to do the same thing in a very readable, maintainable way, while making it shorter. Art can, at times, be very similar.
I enjoyed the Picasso museum in Barcelona and it was indeed eye opening to see his conventional but excellent architectural drawings ;-)
Ultimately this isn't that important, my point was rather about technicality. Technicality alone doesn't make a great master, just like syntax knowledge alone doesn't make you a great software engineer. But in coding the goal is typically to write good software and the criteria for good software are pretty clear — compared to what makes good art at least. Now as an artist you can totally suck at many things but be good at one specific thing that you did in a very specific and novel way and this alone can make the difference.
One could say with our subway painter that the special thing about him are not the paintings but how he medializes their creation. But just painting realistically is something many people can do, and many also can do better.
Indeed. Without wanting to disappear down a philosophical rabbit hole, I think you hit the nail on the head there.