> I absolutely do not want to gatekeep beginners from being able to publish their work on the open internet

FWIW there is no barrier like that for your physical engineers. Even though, as you note, professional engineers exist. Most engineers aren't professional engineers though, and that's why the barrier doesn't exist. We can probably follow a similar framing. I mean it is already more common for licensing to be attached to even random software and that's not true for the engineer's equivalents.