I personally believe it is maybe, because you don`t have to learn it for develop amazing games, because there are a lot of helps like templates etc.
And a blind person might tell you that vision is totally overrated because they never had it, doesn't mean that's technically correct. These people that want to do more than just playing around but refuse to learn are not pragmatic in my opinion but stupid and shoot only themselves in the foot.
For me personally, I am mostly interested in making fun & good games/simulations. The programming is for me is the means and not the goal. Though sometimes I have fun with programming too, like with messing around with AI or such.
That's fair, I guess. I'm not saying people aren't allowed to have different interests or specialize in different things. It's just weird to see people who are set out on making games but then refuse to put the required effort in. It's like someone who wants to cook some great meals and then ends up ordering a Pizza and calls it a successful day.
But yeah, it doesn't sound like you fall into that category.
Programming requires careful planning, forethought, good knowledge not only on the syntax, but on methods and work-arounds to accomplish something that hasn't been done yet. But, very few people experiment, and thanks to them we have Battlefield 4, Occulus and World of Warcraft (old, but still the biggest...can you imagine?).
Sorry, I can't follow you here. Are you saying that these products (of which one is a hardware product) are the result of programmers not being able to experiment?
I've always wanted to be a game designer, not a programmer.
I'll leave my opinion out on that one, but you may want to look into what an actual game designer at a big company does. If you are lucky to ever get that job, it'll not be a fun one and you won't have the freedom you are hinting on wanting. Also lot's of meetings with guys in suites.
I'm not even sure where I fit in the programmer/hobby divide. You along with 3 other people I PM with, have fielded many of my questions beyond the cut/copy/paste method I begin learning with.
Eh, to be fair, everyone has to start somewhere. Everyone starts with copy and pasting at some point, the real question I'm wondering is what is stopping some people from wanting to step further and being able to actually leverage the tools at hand. You don't fall into the category of people not wanting to learn, after all your questions are "Why are things that way" versus "What's the code to do X?"
