Wish everyone could understand that it's not learning the programming language or the 'best practices' that makes you good it's understanding how things work together and how to mix them to create new things that do what you want is the real engineering

That's the problem with most programmers

Actually knowing best practices and principles and properly applying them is very very important for building high quality maintainable software. Applying engineering principles and methodologies make you engineering, not mixing things you know how they work to do what you want. Yes you need to be able to do that too but knowing how it works and mixing it up to create new things to do what you want is just not good enough, it will do fine IF you write high quality code. If you don't it will suck to some extent no matter how good it works.