I wrote a long post but deleted it because it was full of irrelevant background info. I've done quite a bit of full-stack web design with PHP and SQL myself, but it's not my current job. The company I work for has been fighting for months with our contracted web designers because they:
- Have no eye for design or just don't care about design (distasteful animations, bad color contrasts, broken responsiveness). We gave them another site to copy. They come back a month late and in half an hour I had almost 1000 words describing what was required to fix their "finished product".
- Lacked skill outside of customizing a template and adding content. We asked them to make a custom plugin that involved linking part data with their manufacturer information. Basic PHP and SQL. They come back with a single table with every field being a string type. I had to step in and spoon-feed them that we needed multiple tables with links, and stricter typing so that sorting and filtering would actually work.
- Were unwilling to work with us or uncaring about our future experience with the site. It was nearly impossible for us to add new content to the site without diving into the weeds of it, when the solution would have been a wp-admin plugin front end. We did specify we needed an easy way to update the site, but again, the implementation details had to be spoon-fed.
