I encourage you to share your paper when it's finished. This is an interesting discussion that I'd like to see more people joining.
For what it's worth, I don't think "software engineering" should be accorded the same respect as true engineering disciplines. What we do has little resemblance to real engineering in terms of either the systematic, tried and tested approach or the ethical foundation. It is something I think we should aspire to, but we are a long way from reaching that standard today.
That said, I don't think everyone needs to become a full-fledged software engineer to reach the goals set out in the linked piece. If we do ever achieve something like that, I think it will be because the core of the systems is carefully constructed by experts, and because it provides methods for "malleability" also carefully constructed by experts so that non-experts can use them. That recipe has proved successful in the past, in a wide range of applications from game mods to Excel macros, and I see no reason in principle that it couldn't be used much more widely for other types of software if there is some incentive for the experts to build the core and the extensibility framework around it.
For what it's worth, I don't think "software engineering" should be accorded the same respect as true engineering disciplines. What we do has little resemblance to real engineering in terms of either the systematic, tried and tested approach or the ethical foundation. It is something I think we should aspire to, but we are a long way from reaching that standard today.
That said, I don't think everyone needs to become a full-fledged software engineer to reach the goals set out in the linked piece. If we do ever achieve something like that, I think it will be because the core of the systems is carefully constructed by experts, and because it provides methods for "malleability" also carefully constructed by experts so that non-experts can use them. That recipe has proved successful in the past, in a wide range of applications from game mods to Excel macros, and I see no reason in principle that it couldn't be used much more widely for other types of software if there is some incentive for the experts to build the core and the extensibility framework around it.