When I started at NPR 25 years ago things were very different. We were in the last part of the heyday of audio engineering, since we were still an analog shop.  It took an acknowledged amount of skill to do what we did, & the bar was high. Then digital came along. There was a perception that working with audio became easy. Producers & reporters could now record clean audio with a device not much bigger than a deck of cards, then manipulate it easily by using software which worked sort of like a word processor.