I'll admit I am unsure how such individuals would be chosen. I imagine it would be prudent to learn what processes are used by other licensed professions when choosing such individuals.

> who write lots of blog posts and books about programming and give lots of conference keynotes

I do not think people who write blog posts and give conference keynotes should be awarded with roles that regulate the profession because they write blog posts and give keynotes. I would hope that any regulation is evidence driven.

Bring a software engineer into a courtroom as an expert witness, and the jury's eyes will glaze over. Bring in the PE who told their firm not to cut that corner, and the hammer comes down hard.

Even if the certification for software engineers starts as barebones as knowing what WASP is, it still provides an avenue for the feedback mechanism to work (the rules "written in blood"), so that the entire industry can study and learn from what happened, instead of this mess we have now, the peak of which is postmortem blog posts. Even now we have plenty of examples of regulatory frameworks where the regulations adapt to the field like the FDA where you've got a huge spectrum ranging from diagnostics to medical devices of which where are many classes, and drugs where every clinical trial can be tailored to the exact nature of the disease.