Amazon self publishing is just another publishing outlet. Google is just another index page. HN is just another alt.computer board.
Reach for the stars. Let people of lesser ability make news apps, even if it's a struggle for them.
The author already addresses your view though since he shared it. We already have been using PHDs like this for some time now. I think you just don't understand that communication hubs like reddit and HN are not "a waste of talent" especially when you consider portals like these get sold to Conde Naste for millions x 10^x of dollars.
Contrary, I think "reaching for the stars" here is taking ownership of the application instead and understanding the real burden of operations and the impact to your clients and what the real net benefit is (if any) in your application, not the number of 0s on your check. It's not sexy, but nothing complicated is. You're not going to do anything groundbreaking implementing what you were taught in school in the tiny scope of your contract, you're just creating tiny bubbles of technology that may or may not ever offer a benefit to anyone outside that space; contracting yourself out to another Fortune 500 to design a protocol or format to be used in some rented-out walled garden. It might be a great model for retiring, but not so much for a society, it it certainly isn't "reaching for the stars" unless you want to be alone when you get out there.
To the contrary, many complex things are sexy. The iPhone is greatly complex, both in software and hardware, but it's still sexy. By the way, what if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were happy just running a small electronics store in Palo Alto?
Interesting to see your opinion of "reaching for the stars". Also interesting to see you write 2x as much about what "isn't reaching for the stars".
Or how about this: the key to solving problems correctly is to solve them as close to the root cause as possible. Why write a speech recognition when you can get the same functionality much more effectively by eliminating the microphone altogether and interfacing directly with the user (just a hypothetical scenario)? Why write it for iOS when the only reason the person is carrying a phone is so they can be connected on the go, and the only reason they are on the go is to learn something they could have read on Prismatic this morning? You'll never tackle any of these problems if you think that the lower layers are already solved problems cemented in concrete, only worthy to be maintained by tech monkeys.
It's about advancing our society. Making more efficient use of our human resources to enable us to discover new ways of making more efficient use of our human resources. To raise quality of life. To allow more humans to live, which increases our pool of labor and of brainpower, both of which we can use to multiply the other further.
Why do we do this? At this point we're descending into existential ennui. When you look into the abyss, remember the staring game -- make it blink.
My counter is that these things that we take for granted are not "solved problems" and innovation in this space is the most fundamental and disrupting innovation one can engage in, and increasingly the press would turn the public's eye away from this fact since obviously those who control the aggregation of news can control what a large number of people think about different topics. But perhaps you already knew that and find change at this level and its consequences too scary to contemplate.