Read this comment, then read the post, and thought, well, I appreciate the author's thrust, which I would interpret as "become fluent in the fundamentals first" salted and undermined by yes a crotchety get off my lawn overstatement of the utility and value of doing so. Agree with the sentiment, I think, though.
Personal comment: I think you (mrguyorama) are correct in pointing to the complexity of contemporary structures/problems.
I would state this in terms of the where contemporary progress is being, what sorts of problems are being worked on, etc: considerably further into the fractal of hard problems, and in new regions of the problem domain which were not assailable through manual computation.
The tools being used in other words are necessary and appropriate for what kinds of work are being done today.
Aircraft design (etc.) today is only superficially related to what it was in the author's day. We are now in the hard 20% in a lot of ways.
Personal comment: I think you (mrguyorama) are correct in pointing to the complexity of contemporary structures/problems.
I would state this in terms of the where contemporary progress is being, what sorts of problems are being worked on, etc: considerably further into the fractal of hard problems, and in new regions of the problem domain which were not assailable through manual computation.
The tools being used in other words are necessary and appropriate for what kinds of work are being done today.
Aircraft design (etc.) today is only superficially related to what it was in the author's day. We are now in the hard 20% in a lot of ways.