Debugging I'm with you, but the actual time to create simple parts of the game? Going to have to disagree with your disagreement. It's like two lines of code nowadays to move a sprite around on screen and draw it, because you don't have to write your blit function yourself.
You didn't have to write blit functions yourself on the NES either, it had hardware (PPU) that would handle blitting of sprites for you. There were a lot of restrictions that you'd have to work around, but actually displaying something on screen didn't take that much code.
This also indulges the fallacy that the hard part of game development is writing low level graphics routines. That can be difficult to learn but once you know it its relatively straight forward. People don't judge your game on the quality of your sprite drawing functions (unless they're extremely buggy :)).
Trust me, I've been doing this a long time, I'm not pushing out fallacies. But you had to do a hell of a lot more management in NES/SNES/Asm than a simple ->Draw() call.
