>I don't accept the notion that people on salary are any less likely to do outstanding things than independent contractors.
>I've been both and when I look back on my career I find some good and bad moments in both roles, but no heavy weighting on one side of the other.

I've been both and I'd say that having been on both sides gives you just about no insight at all into the mindset of someone who was salaried (aka wage slave) throughout the career. Whichever way you started, you were independent-minded enough to leave one side for the other, probably more than once. This person never was, it's a creature of salary, sucking endlessly on the teat of hierarchy.

While such a person may be full of good will, ideas and enthusiasm in the first years, reality will soon kick in, and as The Axiom of economics states, will start to behave in such a manner that it perceives as most profitable to itself. Put emphasis anywhere you want, the result is the same. The goals won't be customer satisfaction, company growth, company well-being, any kind of Pareto-positive outcome. It will be whatever the guy gets paid for, given raise for, been praised for at review time, and will not be whatever was criticized, frowned upon, ignored, threatened by job loss for or simply irrelevant to the size of the paycheck. And the employers are actually clueless in how to pay them in such a manner as to at least forward the company goals (not to mention the rest of the list), so they do what everyone else does - fixed salary with raises given for staying long enough in the same place or for advancing to a higher position, as per Parkinson's laws (not just bureaucracies - any company).

And I guess the businesses are simply afraid to pay their best much above their position (as the others from the branch would disapprove of the practice and the bad word would reach the bank - this kind of class treason is frowned upon), so a promotion is pretty much the only legal way. And with promotion one gets more bossing and less real work to do. And it's bad both ways - if you promote a good engineer/doctor/other expert into a pretty much administrative figure, you lose one big unit of knowledge in the trenches and get at best a mediocre administrator in the upper echelon. Or you get a good administrator who wasn't that much of an expert anyway, but knew how to work the system, and you're now paying him better than your experts. Which, BTW, the experts will see and understand - they're your experts, they aren't stupid, so they'll get disgruntled really fast, at which point they just stop looking for ways to contribute to the general good of the whole (be it their team, company, city, state...) and start looking for themselves - and apply the above list of dos and donts.

We programmers in small teams or just independent soloists have it as good as it gets. Consider the percentage of administrators compared to that of experts and young, still gruntled, folks who still didn't become embittered with the system and have the enthusiasm. That percentage is still rather good in programming teams, or generally in places where things are designed and made above the routine. Even already within the rest of the IT branch (am: industry) it's horrible - I've seen places (indirectly, as customers of mine) where building up a single virtual machine on which I'd install my app and database would take longer than a year. Yup, the six hour job can stretch anywhere between two weeks or thirteen months, and that's dealing with IT personnel. And your salaried doctor is not in a different position: he has the security guidelines to follow, checklists to tick, i's to dot and t's to cross, CYA paperwork to produce, approvals to request and wait for, bosses on vacation who make this wait long (as they haven't delegated the authorization for the duration) etc etc.