Maybe this will get dead'ed, but I understand where the author is coming from. Believe it or not, what designers are feeling and how they're acting is nothing all that special or unique - it's happened to many different fields over the course of history. When a new, cheaper way of doing things comes around, buyers celebrate, and sellers get really, really upset.

Do you know the term "Luddite", meaning someone that's technologically backwards? It came from loomweavers who protested and actually broke mechanized looms that made weaving (and thus clothing) much cheaper. Not too long ago, people bought or made a new shirt every year or two. One shirt. You wore it all year, and patched it up if it tore. It was expensive! It all hand-weaved.

When mechanized looms came in, it sped weaving up - clothes got a lot cheaper, but less weavers were needed. Many weavers didn't like that. Some actually took to breaking looms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite -

"The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested—often by destroying mechanized looms—against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their entire way of life."

Horse drivers protested cars once they started catching on too. This is how it goes. It's not a glamorous passing of the torch with dignity or anything like that. Design used to cost a hell of a lot, and now it doesn't necessarily.

But I sympathize. It happened to web designers too. The first website I had commissioned cost something like $13,000 and it wasn't all that long ago. (It was late and over budget - but the features were really good for the era. We had a scrolling news bar - I can't even begin to explain how cutting edge that was for the time)

Paul Graham sold Viaweb for $45 million. I had something with more power and fuctionality put together only a few years later for $13,000. Now you could get similar quality for $500-$1000 professionally, or hack around with a CMS and do it for a couple hundred bucks yourself.

But I imagine a lot of website designers and coders lost their jobs, or changed the way they did business. It was a gravy train for a while - now, not so much. I can imagine that there's a designer somewhere throwing darts at a picture of Matt Mullenweg, saying, "Curse you and your Wordpress! Curse you! Curse you to hell!"

For tangible products, I still pay for design I know is good with someone that can capture emotion very well. But if it's just a project I'm slapping up and come what may, I'll Elance that sucker and get 10 potential, slapped together designs for $50. I'll spend another $20 to $50 to iterate on that and it'll work to start. Actually, forget Elance these days - 99designs.com looks like the future. Fellow Hacker Newser bobz turned me onto the site - it looks pretty amazing for getting a passable design done on a budget.

But I do sympathize. Progress is all the consumers of society, but it can be painful for the people who produced the old way. You can look at the legacy airlines or United Auto Workers or farriering (horseshoeing) or swordssmiths or "workstation" style superpowered computers, or any number of things. People had to radically change how they did their work, or change their work, or not work.

I sympathize. A good designer is worth a hell of a lot, and the proven, world class designers will continue to be paid well for highly leveraged projects.

The price pressure for the bottom is here to stay though - people in rural parts of developing countries, high school kids and maybe even middle school kids, people just casually screwing around who don't care about the craft... and, maybe even, some people who work fast and can put out a first iteration in 20-30 minutes, and revise it in another 20-30 minutes, and win a $200 contest 1/4th of the time they enter. That'd be $50/hour in money and they'd have a huge portfolio that they can use to revise on as templates for jobs or sell as stock design afterwards.

The old way is gone. The new way will work once we all adjust. But we ought to sympathize with the plight of people who are forced to change through no fault of their own - change is typically hard and unpleasant, and you and I will curse the next time our fields change as well.