What stands out to me is how many smart people spent their best years optimizing around the constraints of a system that was fundamentally misaligned with real-world demand. The tech is fascinating, but incentives turned the whole space into a gravity well for speculation rather than creation.

The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.

What's that saying... people won't understand something if they're being paid to not understand it.