As background, my husband minored in physics in college and was a few courses short from getting a second major in it. He's currently working on his doctorate in music composition, as I've mentioned before. It's a far cry from my structural background.
Having been able to closely observe our careers within our respective fields for the past eight years, I really think that there's no distinct way that anybody can say, out and out, that one field is more difficult than the other. Y'all know about the engineering challenges that we face, and yeah, the concepts are pretty difficult. As a composer's wife, though, I've had to tag along to countless new music concerts, and I can't say that I understand atonal music any more easily than I understand lateral-torsional buckling mechanisms. It's a real challenge to sit there and listen and try to make sense out of what I'm hearing. I'm *still* hearing new stuff in my husband's masters thesis that I hadn't realized was there before.
And it's not even just that there's a degree of difficulty to it... In my field, there may be lots of ways to correctly design a beam, but the end result is binary. It works, or it ain't. There are varying degrees of better-and-worse, but if it achieves the goal, then it's my call as to whether it makes it into the final design. I hand my work on a piece of paper to a crew who builds it, and if they want to critique my work, then they've got to issue a formal question and I get to either correct my error or tell them why they're being idiots. In a subjective field like writing or art or music, your works and your opinions can be called into question by *anybody*. That is why these subjective fields are *so* difficult to make a difference in... Public opinion is so fickle and so subjective that it's incredibly nerve-wracking for the artist. For every big public performance, I buy my husband two cards… one for if it goes well, one for if it doesn't.
We probably perceive art as being less critical than our own engineering careers, and that's probably valid, from a life-basics point of view. I mean, I design safe hospitals, my husband writes quartets. I have the corner on the market of life-critical jobs in our house. I once told my husband that it must suck for him to have to spend his entire life in pursuit of a career that could be replaced entirely by kittens. He looked shocked for a moment, and asked me what the heck I was talking about… I said that music doesn't really do anything aside from make people happy, and kittens make people happy, so if you were to do away with music you could just replace it with kittens and you'd be okay. Thankfully, he's used to my macabre sense of humor, so he laughed… But he only laughed because he knows I'm kidding. Society remembers the musicians and the artists for a reason… Such subjective matter is what makes civilization civilized. We value free speech in this country so much more highly than we value free wastewater treatment services, and for good reason.
Both realms are important, and both are very difficult, for different reasons.. Neither should be considered as less necessary or inferior to the other.
Mmkay, I'm done. Anybody else want the soapbox?
