Not a given by any means, but it’s happened before and it will happen again.

All it would really take is a company of decent scale deciding they want to base their engine around Godot and having an appetite to upstream some meaningful work.

I apologize for being a bit snide in my original challenge, I'm fairly sensitive to the "why don't you just" attitude, but I agree with pretty much everything you have to say here.

I have a very similar approach around enumerating and testing assumptions when the going gets tough, and similarly have found that has enabled me to solve a handful of problems previously claimed impossible.

I think the tautological issue with our initial framing is that if you're able to easily identify these problems you probably are a subject matter expert. In many ways it's the outsider art of analytical problem solving - established wisdom should not be sacred.

First was some downhill skateboarding projects - a bushing recommendation system and a site that allowed me to search all NZ skate shops from one place.

A popular US skate shop posted on Reddit looking for interns, but they weren’t interested in hiring so remotely.

Fast forward a week and the CTO got in touch to say that he’d interviewed a bunch of dud candidates, and meanwhile had been watching me commit exactly the code they were looking for.

Ended up contracting with them for a bit building an internal equivalent of the search tool, as well as bushing recommendations integrated with their listings.

The next is my work in the Cycle.js community (niche FRP JS framework). Mostly worked on trendy dev tools, but also did some valuable work on improving the speed, reliability and clarity of async UI tests that is still arguably close to best-in-class for JS.

That resulted in multiple job offers and an approach from Manning for a possible book deal, but none of it was that good of a fit.

Probably a similar situation.

I avoided taking the lane while I started, but after being forced into the gutter and nearly side-swiped multiple times, I started regularly taking the lane for my own safety.

That’s what really disappointed me about motorists as a cyclist - you give them an inch and they try to kill you.

They’ve definitely made some significant missteps over the last few years, mostly around breaking storage APIs and being slow to fix it due to being part of the macOS release cadence.

It definitely happens in the wild as well, I’ve seen devs using copilot for napkin math far more than I’m comfortable with.