Explosion of mediocrity, video gaming edition: it’s become easier to build games, so there are more and more games every year; but the number of highly acclaimed games per year has stayed constant or even declined slightly (orange dots).

Nabeel S. Qureshi

More accessible does not mean success comes more easily or more work will have higher quality. Accessibility is orthogonal to magnitude and density of quality.

For any creative endeavor, this is true. Axiomatically, if you make something easier, you’re lowering the cost of entry. This applies to average creators as much as potential superstars like Mozart, Carmack, or Einstein.

If you make it easier to do, less devoted, determined, or talented people will do it. More people means you will see more volume, making “merely” average work seem more common. The work you observe might also be more uniform or bland, since making something accessible often means many folks are starting from similar templates or boilerplates.

This might sound a bit elitist. But, I think there’s plenty of room to produce great work without elite skill. ZZ Top and AC/DC are far less sophisticated, and their members less talented, than Prince or Van Halen, but still produce work that carries an appeal of its own.

The same applies to software. You don’t need a room full of doctorates to produce excellent software, you don’t need a master of arcana to produce fast software, and you don’t need a transcendent genius to solve someone’s problem in a well-considered product.