Is canned stuff hard to manipulate?

I've read Citizen Coors by Dan Baum, a book on the Coors dynasty of Golden, Colorado. Bill Coors invented the aluminum can, and one of the tangents the book delves into has to do with the history of aluminum cans. At first, you had to have a church key independent of the can to punch a hole in it so that you might drink from it.

 
 

Eventually humanity had the advanced technology of ring pulls. I can just barely remember these from my childhood. You could cut your feet on them and the odds stepping on one barefoot was significant as they were a common piece of litter. Well, at least "you coulda had a V8" without needing a church key too.

 
 

Bill Coors tried different things to deal with the ring pull problem. He made something like the Alcoa tab without the tab allowing drinkers to punch a circle that would cave in and cut their fingers, and he eventually refactored this to something called "Press Tab Two" in which one slowly pressed two comparable tabs on either side of a can's top, but there was some pressurization problem and the approach really only worked well in the high altitudes of the Colorado Rockies. Eventually humanity did persevere and we ended up with the common Alcoa tab we know today. It allows you to open a can without a church key while not producing an independent piece of trash.

 
 

Speaking of canned stuff, I remember learning Allaire (church key) Cold Fusion back in 1999 as my first language for the web. Without a programmer's background, I couldn't write or understand C-shaped code, but I didn't have to! Cold Fusion provided what appeared to be a new set of HTML tags that rendered to real HTML tags when Cold Fusion's server returned content for the browser. I could talk to an access database, cycle through a loop, and write if/then logic. This sure seemed wonderful at the time. As I began working with PHP, and I found there were ways to concatenate and split strings, I saw Macromedia (ring pull) Cold Fusion in a different light and I realized that the technology was limited by way of being canned. The easy pseudoHTML sure was easy to work with, one could pick it up quick, and, best of all, there was no C-shaped language, but the downside was that one could only do canned things, and if concatenation and splits weren't in the canning they were unobtainable. I haven't used Cold Fusion in ages, but I've heard secondhand that modern day Adobe (Alcoa tab) Cold Fusion now includes a tag that allows one to break into a C-shaped code for Cold Fusion the way one might break into JavaScript with a Script tag. The users who loved a canned solution have grown up and have demanded that their software grow with them, hence Cold Fusion had to cease to be canned. This is not what the original Allaire peeps envisioned.

Question: Is this the inevitable path for all canned solutions? SharePoint could be traveling this way. As one progresses from developing in SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 to what I've heard secondhand of SharePoint 2013, one starts working more and more in Visual Studio and less exclusively through a browser interface. If Pega is here to stay will Pega developers one day be able to break out of the browser-based programming into Peggy script?