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.