Please don't generalize, this is not always true. Being a programmer (with a formal CS background) who used to make a living as a professional designer, I have met a lot of people like me. Good design is about solving problems, good programmers usually solve problems. When it comes to aesthetics, it's something that people do learn, and programmers can learn, too.
- giving the executive decision powers in the hands of most of the developers is a recipe for a disastrous product
I respectfully disagree here too, for the sole reason that developers can learn the ability of making decisions in a relatively rational way. I would even wager to say they might be more inclined to trust in data.
Correction: Most programmers make terrible designers. I've met and worked with some that can handle both well and a few that are exceptional in many realms technical and design.
Now the "designer" that glued the Metro interface on to Windows 8 should stick to smartphones. I'm about to write shim to make the OS boot into a CLI interface, so I can avoid the "Tiles" and get somework done.