Exactly! The days of one man having an idea and doing a whole game programming project from start to finish are long gone (they did exist, but mainly during the 80s). The companies all use division of labour (expert musicians, graphicians, coders, storytellers, etc) and try to use ready-made and tried and tested programming libraries to save time and the vast amount of money they spend to develop their games.
It reminds me of this interview of David Carradine I saw once. He said "People want to learn to kung fu so they can crack heads, but by the time they could conceivably crack a head, they don't want to cracks heads any more".
I had this game idea once, that I was really keen on. I took some advice and learnt to program in C, from scratch. I don't regret it because it was useful and fun to teach myself a subject I was interested in, but now I've forgotten that game idea (and obviously haven't developed a game). Using a game creation utility (like Game Maker 6) I could make a nice game in about a week. I think that's a better use of time than working out a design to code the whole game from scratch.
It's like you're a boss of a big company. You need to know that the people under you can do their job, but you don't necessarily need to know exactly how the postman uses the stamping machine on the envelopes, or how the secretary's spreadsheet works, etc. You just give policy orders like: this month we're focussing on making more Far Eastern sales or whatever.
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