Like I said, that used to be the case but not anymore. Software engineers are now more inclined with the business process as well as the technical process and are usually the ones performing gap analysis, etc when working with a project. Big companies don’t want to hire a whole team to perform software development so they hire one person that can do the job of all the aspects of SDLC. Back in the say you would have Systems Analyst, Systems Architect, Programmer, DBA, QA, etc but now they try to get as much out of one person rather than hiring more.
Also, I beg to differ about your logic that anyone with enough intellectual can learn programming. I have seen code written by people who became programmers like what you have defined and believe me I have had to write all the code from scratch since nothing there looked like code but a patchy job of putting together pieces that worked together.
I m sorry that you don’t see your work as an achievement but I m very proud to be in software development and at the end of the feel that I have achieved something if I can make someone’s life a bit easier by automation.