It is a remarkable change in attitude. Back in the day DB was one of the best train services in Europe. It had British Rail of the same era on the ropes.
I'm a long term programmer and a very short term stenographer (over 20 years vs. 3 months). I'm cautiously optimistic that it could be a help with entering code given a correctly set up IDE. That said - I don't think the advantage is high speed entry of text. The speed of thought is the obvious bottleneck rather than typing speeds.
Where there might be an advantage is that it might be possible to set up chords to do relatively complex structural manipulations of text and give that chord a useful phonetic name. The sort of thing that expert emacs users do almost as a matter of course. Learning emacs well would be a far more conventional approach of course but steno does offer the possibility of easier to remember commands (once you've understood and learned the phonetic system).
I'm actually in the process of learning the Plover theory. Largely for fun. After a month of drills, learning to find my way around the keyboard, I've started transcribing an old Harry Harrison story The Man from P.I.G.
It has a herd of space pigs and a substantial vocabulary so it's hardly formulaic. That doesn't seem to have been a problem so far.
Deliberate Programming might be a better term; it encompasses the idea of steady progress, and solid intent.
- update - I see this has already been suggested. Still like it...
There are at least two alternatives to ClojureM; iOS7 runs js directly so ClojureScript can be used with a certain amount of fiddling. There is also a method of compiling Java into objective-c that is built into the Clojure Nightcode IDE. I ran some basic experiments over the holidays and both methods work, although there are inevitable trade offs.
Similar age, similar history, although currently employed and having a blast with some new toys....
I re-entered the trenches by specialising in one hot technology (iOS) and producing a series of apps on my own account.
From your description, I suspect a CS degree would probably bore you and it wouldn't make a great deal of difference to your employability. That's not to dismiss university out of hand though. There are other departments where technology hits the road in a way that throws up opportunities all over the place. In your position I'd consider taking a few courses (not necessarily a whole degree) from a decent business/marketing faculty...real world experience can bring a lot to the table and they certainly do deal with fuzzy, hard to define, difficult, and above all, profitable problems.
I did a fascinating MOOC in gamification a few months back, if only I wasn't so busy....
I worked with him many years ago at Myrias in Alberta, Canada, his name (pronounced 'Ruru') is of Ukranian extraction I believe. For what it's worth, he was extremely able then, if he says this is going on, I'd take it seriously.