You just stumbled into and argument the game industry has been dealing with for years, whether or not programmers or artists should own shader code. This boils down to whether or not you implement a visual node based shader editor in your game engine. While I agree that expecting designers to know "modern gpu programming" is extreme, exposing fragment shader style functionality isn't a bad idea, if properly implemented. I also don't think it'd be super difficult for designers to grok.
> exposing fragment shader style functionality isn't a bad idea, if properly implemented.
I agree that functionality like fragment shaders is useful, as long as it's declarative and fits in with the rest of CSS. In fact, we already have it: the CSS filter property.
