APIs and tools help you get things done that you could not possibly have the time to code from hand.
Having worked at a place where everything was done by hand, there is a serious price to pay down the line for the organization. Sure, it's possibly not as cool and interesting and intellectually satisfying for the programmer, but you're a business programmer. Get used to it, or find another job. If you want creativity and fun and zoomy toys and such then go get a job making just over minimum wage programming games.
Incidentally, any architect that doesn't consider who's doing the work when picking the tools, and who starts changing things half way through because he found a new one, is an idiot and not really an architect in my opinion. On the other hand, you're going to have to learn new things to stay in the business. Deal with it. The things people used to write web applications 8 years ago are no longer relevant. My productivity (functionality to time ratio) is an order of magnitude higher using something like Ext JS over hand coding raw HTML and Javascript.