[malwrar]

If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

An engineering team's goal is to take a problem and implement a solution. That is the mission. Anything that leads towards the completion of the problem their team wants to solve is in service of the mission. I don't understand what is complicated about that, what are you seeing that we're not?

In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations, visions, dreams to fill a graveyard

Once the mission is no longer worth pursuing or becomes muddled, teams fall apart and motivation crumbles. My github has plenty of repos I've stopped working on because I stopped seeing why it was worth my time to work on those projects and moved on to things that would be of greater benefit to me. That's how things should be.