This is a fantastic post for many reasons.

To add to what Mario has shared (which is hard to do because it's so well-written and comprehensive) is that there are a lot of people who have gotten into WordPress with no form of training in computer science, software engineering, architecture, and so on.

I'm not saying that a formal degree is required to do this - now more than ever we have the resources online to teach this kind of stuff - but simply going through pre-written files and changing out strings or installing plugins is not development.

When it comes to other fields such as Objective-C, .NET, Rails, etc., most of the people who work in those environments are people who have the conceptual understanding of how software is put together, they are familiar with concepts like version control and why it's useful, understand the importance of project management software, and are familiar with bug tracking and reporting software so that they can resolve issues with their products.

WordPress, on the other hand, is more like the wild west. You've got people ranging from those who cowboy code on the server to those who have strong opinions about the development tools they use on their local machine (and why they use them).

The latter will likely be the ones you want building you a solution on top of WordPress.

Unfortunately, I don't think that we'll ever really see an end to the competition that exists from those who are less experienced and "assembling" solutions with themes and plugins to those who have a background in engineering or programming and who have chosen WordPress as their platform of choice for solving problems.

If you're looking to get more and more serious about WordPress development, there are some incredibly smart people in the community and every single day I think there's an opportunity to learn from them (especially from guys like Mario, for example) so use those opportunities to expand what you're doing via reading blogs, talking in IRC and/or Slack channels, reading source code, working on side projects, and so on.