The reason why design is a dying art is pretty simple - managers.

I remember I was once given a seemingly impossible project to build in three or four months. I set up local newsgroups (this was a long time ago) and started decomposing the project into parts and evaluating them for difficulty and solutions.

After a day or so, one of the partners sent me an email. "Why are you doing this? No one's reading what you're writing. Why aren't you coding?"