I feel that bashing "people today" has become something of a fad in the tech community.
I'm a software engineer, and I do come across dozens of people with software degrees who couldn't design an application to save their lives. I've done interviews with "software engineers" who were unable to draw a UML class diagram. (For all the hardware peeps out there, that's kind of like an EE not remembering the symbol for a resistor.) So yes, the idiots are out there.
But still, I feel that being a techhead has become synonymous with being a grumpy, grinchy old guy who goes on and on about "these youngsters these days".
Thing is, I think today is a much better time for electronics hobbyists than, say, 10 or 20 years ago. I feel that many people lost interest in hardware around the time computers really exploded. I also felt that software gave you unprecedented horizons, instant gratification, without any of the ferrous chloride, broken drill bits or burnt fingers.
Today, you only need to mess with ferrous chloride if you really want to - etching your own PCBs have become something like developing your own films. Something you only ever do if you really, really enjoy it. We have all these microcontroller and embedded computing development platforms like the Arduino, Beaglebone or Rpi... We have hackerspaces. We have open source hardware. We have the Internet for sharing knowledge.
It really has never been this good.
Of course, partially because of the above, the entry barrier is a lot lower than it has been. We have lots of "makers", a good percentage of whom are, actually, artists. You can be a "maker", design and build functionality, without having decent hardware skills. You can "fiddle" with hardware in the way you could do it with software back in the day. It's important to understand that this is not a drop in the quality of hobbyists, it's simply a new population that has entered the field.
(Some people look down on this, but hey... Look at all the awesome software people there are today. They all started out coding away like monkeys when they were young.)