The degree to which my statement is true depends on the degree to which a programmer's abstract model incorporates _machine realities_. If your model takes into account the process model, and what is required for those process models to communicate, you are already modeling with mechanical sympathy. Programming languages (von nuemann languages) are all opinionated expositions of the same machinery, so the cost of translating the model to the language is a real cost.

My anecdata is the opposite of yours; the people that feel like the _actually coding_ is the bottleneck tend to be the people that have the _most_ editor fluency, as they are(were?) motivated to remove the bottleneck.