This community has always lacked working artist and working designers.
As for the designer, we have tons for qualified programmers who just fall blank in the idea department. They have the programming and organizational skills, the studying and planning skills. However, they just blank on a great idea path.
The other-side of the coin are the people who just think they are designers.This is like waking up on day and just claiming to be the boss of your work-place, even if you lack the skills to be boss and knowledge of what those skills even are to be in charge. They have simple ideas or pieces of other games they would like to mesh together.They tend to lack the programming skills to think up the design and the organizational skills and planning skills to fully flesh-out and document a project. So you end up programming for someone who took 2 hours to think out your next 20 days of hell and rewritten code. Because they have no idea the path and are trying to think it up or correct it as fast as you can code the last idea-part of their blind mans run.

Of course to the solo developer this does not apply. You need not plan and document a path if you are the whole team... However, I would work on project teams with a real game designer and a true documented design path for me to work from.
And as I've taken on trying to be the Boss , I've been both types of the above designer , and in turn.