Civic issues

Not a few engineers are actually doing stuff like planning the cooling for buildings, construct things in CAD or draw plans.

Not a few engineers are actually doing stuff like planning the cooling for buildings, construct things in CAD or draw plans. There might be some people involved afterwards that actually put those plans into reality and then it becomes a supervisor job similar to what you describe. BUT, thats only part of the job, not the core. I see it similar to programming, before it was kind of a craft, many crafts are not paid very well, I know that woodworking can be very fulfilling but Ikea exists and noone pays you 1000€ for a simple table. But programming was a well paid craft because people are bad at thinking in general and not everyone can do the thinking good. Now we externalize the thinking and hope it will just work somehow... But the point is..that is a different job. Others already said it, suddenly you are a manager and not a craftsperson anymore. No more tinkering. About the hobby stuff, I hate that the unannoited ones slop there way into _my_ hobby space, pollute everything with one shots that get abandoned in a few hours and drown everything with their half baked brain childs without polish that all look and feel so same-ish, the "map of something something" projects I have seen that were missing any kind of error validation or check of completness is astonishing.