This is going to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I would say the need for designers is hugely overblown.
Most of the time the only people I hear complaining about UI design are UI designers. Except for exceptionally bad cases, most people don't care too much what their applications look like.
And most people would rather have a working implementation with an ugly UI than a pretty picture/mockup that doesn't do anything.
IMHO it's the designer's job to make the UI. That means providing the programmer with templates, CSS, and UI related JavaScript.
If all the designer can do is mockups, then IMHO they are not doing their full job. Like I said in the other reply, it's like a programmer saying "I made the DB schema, what more do you want?"
You are saying that a mockup is basically nothing, that anyone can do it. If that's true, why do we need designers at all?