Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."