I wouldn't be so quick to throw away the "software engineering mindset" quite so quickly. Part of an engineering mindset is roughly "I am prepared to stand up in court and defend all the choices I made designing this product to a jury of my peers". If we can get to that point, where there is a set of guidelines so clear, and so universally accepted, that you could get 12 arbitrary software developers to uniformly agree that the designer chose well in following them, and we could actually use them to do useful design work, that would be such a huge step forward that the profession would change unrecognisably.

We're not there yet.