> Who cares about platform or depth of technical knowledge?
The programmer does. There are a lot of really smart programmers that just want to work on interesting challenges. And if you're the kind of programmer that enjoys solving difficult problems, you're not going to find many when building web 2.0 apps.
Really, you believe that? The two challenges that immediately come to mind are scaling and data mining, but there are a number of others. The use cases presented by the web have pushed distributed computing further than any other single thing in computing history. The web is just the interface the user interacts with... the stuff that's going on behind the scenes is still really interesting and very challenging. Building a web app requires both sides of the equation, it's not just writing some html.
Not really, most web apps are just CRUD (and MVC if you're lucky). What percentage of all web apps (remember, this includes apps that are only ever used on a corporate intranet) ever get to tackle scaling or data mining?
There are many examples of boring corporate non-webapp programs. Visual Basic was the most popular language once and it has nothing to do with web programming.
When basic things are hard, you have fun challenges addressing basic things. When basic things are easy, you are free to do more interesting things at a higher level. Web apps are easy. Making interesting web apps that do really cool things and solve serious problems - its as hard as any kind of app.
Your problem is that you're focusing on the same challenges and finding them easy, instead of thinking about what new things this simplicity enables. Step up a level, use the higher level tools to build better things - and you'll be challenged again. And you'll make better things.
The programmer does. There are a lot of really smart programmers that just want to work on interesting challenges. And if you're the kind of programmer that enjoys solving difficult problems, you're not going to find many when building web 2.0 apps.