"Legacy" seems to have such a negative connotation nowadays, but it depends on what they mean by "legacy." To some people, "being stuck" with core tech and vanilla anything is "legacy." In any case, I contend that the strength in your skills and intimate knowledge in handling core tech will go a long way more than the number of "cutting-edge techs" you can list in your resume. Not only that, it will filter out shallow employers/clients, who are too busy chasing after wind to pay more attention to quality and craftsmanship at the foundational level. Good employers worth considering will value your skills in core vanilla tech and other non-tech factors such as knowing how to design things for humans and how you solve various problems. Using a particular tech/tool is just a mean to the end. It doesn't mean you shouldn't learn some of them. I just think that strength in directly handling core/vanilla tech complements you more as an advanced level developer.

I believe you are heading in the right direction. I've used Sass for a while, but I stopped using it on a regular basis because I found it quicker and easier to fiddle with CSS directly. And yes, I found the same thing; I get the same variable-like effect by grouping selectors by declaration.

Absolutely not, even if you already know what you are doing. Googling allows you to explore how others solve a similar problem. It's not just to look up syntaxes and cheatsheet.

I'm sorry you've been going through depression and that your family has been taking a hit from all of these things you described. Honestly, I don't see any good reasons to stay especially if you are thinking of starting a family. In my experiences, I found that trying to work with people like your co-founder is a colossal waste of time and emotional energy. I'm not sure what's keeping you from leaving right now. It is shockingly obvious to me even through mere descriptions of the issues at hand I can see this co-founder guy doesn't give a rat's tail about you. If I were you, I would start planning a graceful exit immediately. I would also try hard to stick around as long as I can in the current state of things purely for the sake of consistent cash flow for the time being. It's all business. Start a job search right now, or start your own business doing something else on the side and grow it enough to live on it. Then, when you are ready, just leave. That's what I would do anyway. Good luck.

I find it very insightful and, as a bonus, answered some more questions I've always had about SEO in general. Hats off to you.

Hanah Steven , Unfortunately, I think it is relatively common for people who can work only by tweaking existing templates and frameworks to call themselves a "developer." Your post reminds me of this article: https://devwp.eu/development/dont-call-yourself-a-developer-if-you-dont-code/ The author discusses the exact problem you bring up in your question. I tend to agree with him, and I'm also sure that Jason Knight can say a lot about what he thinks of the article. ;) In any case, I think the people you hired cut a lot of corners and overcharged you for their work. It's a red flag when I hear stuff like someone using an off-the-shelf premium theme for a WordPress project that's supposed to be a "full-custom" job. I wouldn't pay any more than $30 for someone to customize it for me if I were in your situation and that's what you want. (= Hire someone to customize for you so you won't need to mess with it yourself.) But then, I wouldn't even use such shortcut myself. WordPress premium themes are bad news in my past experiences using them.

WordPress has burnt my rear in the past as well (albeit as a user), so I feel your pain. As a user, I've tried a few visual WP page builders, a dozen themes from ThemeForest, and three theme frameworks. ALL of them are utter garbage, and they are some of the reasons that drove me to learn to code so I could put together a website correctly without a poorly-designed crutch.

Jason Knight the sheer ridiculous amount of placebo nonsense (like Yoast) that amount to nothing Would you elaborate on this? I agree with you on all your points (WordPress has burnt my rear in the past!), but I want to know more specifics on the Yoast part and what you mean by "placebo nonsense."

Brian English Now I prefer tools that just do the job, minimum of fuss, maximum productivity. That's the part I don't understand. It wasn't like that at all when I tried various extensions from DMXZone and WebAssist, especially the one involved in connecting to a database. I gave them a try for about two years before finally giving up on them. It was a lot of fuss trying to get them to do things, and I found it more productive to learn to code and working directly with code later on. And, of course, the responses to that were always similar to one of the following, "I have not experienced any of those problems you are describing. It works great for me. Therefore, it must be you." "You should send a support request to the developer and stop complaining." "You've got to know how to use your tool properly." "Have you uninstall and reinstall the extension? Have you reinstalled the OS? The bug is probably on Dreamweaver, so you should contact Adobe instead." I particularly loved this one: "You should help the developer make the software better. You should be more patient in troubleshooting." It felt more like being a beta tester than being a paying user using a tool to do something useful. And it gets tiring when the vast majority of the first response in a support forum is often about how I was the odd one having "strange problems" that were supposedly so rare among other users that it must be just me. It's like being in a religious cult in some way. And that's why I'm learning to code now. I feel far more liberated than ever compared to the time I was stuck relying on those types of tools. I can confidently say that I spend much less time troubleshooting my tools (it's just a code editor and a browser) and spend more time building something with the code. I can code in any environment (I can do stuff in my code editor, JSFiddle, CodePen, whatever... it just doesn't matter anymore) and apply the same coding skills. I just code stuff wherever I need to. To me, that is the kind of productivity and flexibility I would like to have more and more.

The irony is that experienced developers will not even bother using something like Wappler. They will just code, and at least competent ones would curse at anything that a GUI software like this generates. I found that the best way to become more productive in web development was to stop avoiding hard work of learning and practicing, master the core technologies first and foremost, figure out how I could write less code to begin with, and avoid a thick abstraction layer that has the issue of leaky abstraction and adds a whole set of troubleshooting work.