Software is plenty tinkerable now, especially with so much of it being open source. Though applications rarely are, I don't know if that was all that different back then either for most people.

edit: I think I misunderstood your last paragraph to mean we'll need to keep low level skills available so we don't lose the knowledge. I think you actually meant that we don't currently understand what the next generation will need to know to be effective which is a fair point, though have we ever known what skills the future requires?

/edit

There are still companies producing lower level engineering work, and the world still needs it. If academia and industry can't maintain the skills needed, bigger corporations will be able to run their own internal programs in collaboration with universities to produce the talent and those people would be paid handsomely.

With open source operating systems out there I also see it as being a recorded knowledge. Something that can be re-learned from, what will one day be referred to as, Ancient Codebases.