What you describe, Bernie, is merely one aspect of the diminution,
dismissal, deprecation and degradation of the role of the amateur in modern
society.

This applies, alas, in so many fields.
From many more, I select three examples at random :-

1. In science - where it is assumed that the only significant scientific
research is that which commands massive financial grants and gargantuan
plant and equipment. It is said for example that we have 'opted out of the
space race' through lack of government funding.
What nonsense! The fact is that most of what we know about the nature of
space (and time) has cost us only two professorial salaries (those of
Hawkins and Penrose).

2. In sport - where the media is exclusively concerned with spectacular
events involving celebrities who command astronomical salaries, and who are
traded for telephone-number sums as if they were goods and chattels. All we
see on TV screens is an unholy marriage of high finance and showbiz, falsely
masquerading under the alias of 'sport'. *True* sport - by which I
understand such events as cricket on the village green, an afternoon of
tennis with convivial friends, the local pubs' darts match etc is is not
merely ignored, it is actually discouraged. As when its governors, to their
everlasting shape in the 50's declared the Wimbledon tournament - until
then a strictly amateur event - open only to so-called 'professionals'. Thus
depriving at a stroke the amateur tennis player of a goal of excellence to
strive at.

3. In music - which is rapidly going the same way as sport, with the
demise of home music making round the cottage piano, and the near
extinction of that endangered species - the amateur string quartet. Instead
we seem to prefer - like couch potatoes -to watch hypnotically as
professionals perform pagannenical musical acrobatics as as if they were
circus clowns.

'Floreat Amatandum!'