Actually I have been programming almost daily for the last 40 years. And I have watched from front row some of the best software developers in the world as they worked. As well as some terrible ones.
That is why I think that swapping Gavin for Greg was a disaster for bitcoin...
Actually the jokes on you, Jorgi. I'm a career programmer too, that's actually looked at some of the recent Core releases, and I can tell you that there's been maybe only a handful of lines of code added to Core in the last year or two.
A. Handful. Of. Lines. In. Over. A. Years. Time.
So let's don't over-glorify these so called developers and put them up on some sort of pedestal. Like they've got their noses to the grindstone every day, furiously cranking out mountains of code. If they had only coded that much in a business world white collar desk job setting, they'd be fired by now for being over-paid slackers.
P.S.- And the truth/reason is, after 6 years of development, Bitcoin Core is pretty much complete and solid at this point. All the heavy lifting was done years ago. With the exception of increasing block size, and maybe a few other little things, there's very little left for the Core developers to actually do. So they're basically just downshifted into long term maintenance mode at this point, which anyone with their knowledge can do on the side for a few hours a week.
That is because they are only working on their own company's off-chain solutions and stonewalling on any improvements to the client to enable scaling. Oh they also spend tons of time on reddit and other forums posting messages to argue why blocking the stream of transactions is necessary.
Greg, Peter and several others have openly stated that they do not like Bitcoin's design and that it shouldn't work in practice. Despite the fact that it does.
Under Satoshi and then Gavin we had don't of regular improvements in the client, now under Greg and Peter we have none.