Yeah, I'd have to disagree, to a certain extent. I think that to say that serving the end user completely as a programmer is a great thing. But to say that A) Coding is "just math" is completely incorrect. Coding is working with a language. A real programmer is a Creative individual, not necessarily an Analytical individual. It takes analytical skills and talent to realize what you need to program. But a good line of code is an elegant, poetic, wholeheartedly joyous expression of logic, efficiency, and your own Voice as a speaker of programming language. B) To ask that developers have the same skillsets as designers / graphic artists / branding specialists / etc. etc. is just really... Unreasonable. A basic conceptual understanding, sure. But I'll NEVER know what someone with a BFA degree knows. Not even a thumble's worth. And that's as it should be.
At the end of the day, trying to be "good" at both disciplines is going to leave you severely lacking in either one area or the other. And that's why I mock job postings that read along the lines of "We want you to know everything from doing print catalogs to how to performance tweak a database". Those are _at_least_ two different people.
I can think of 300 sites that need to be re-coded off the top of my head if this is a hard stop on it. And I don't have time for that. Nor does anyone else. I understand what they're saying, and I understand the need to migrate over time ( i.e. stop using mysql and move to mysqli today ). But they need to be cognizant of how many hundreds of thousands of sites this will potentially effect. This is a security origin, but the effects would be felt in business bottom lines. if ( $hard_stop ), just to reiterate that...
Wow. This is a really ugly workaround for a problem that began when you started using MVC. I would assume that any savings in db calls is completely wasted in processing overhead. Even more was wasted just coming up with this rigmarole. More reasons why MVC is bad juju.
At the end of the day, trying to be "good" at both disciplines is going to leave you severely lacking in either one area or the other. And that's why I mock job postings that read along the lines of "We want you to know everything from doing print catalogs to how to performance tweak a database". Those are _at_least_ two different people.