In a very real sense, we are all just using assembly with code generation.

I really like your point on symptoms of insufficient abstraction. I do worry that we always see abstraction as belonging in language. Which in turn we treat as a precious singleton, and fight about.

At least in my own hacking, I'm surprised how infrequently I see programmers write programs that write programs. I'm surprised how infrequently I see programmers programming their shell, editor, or IDE.