[PaulHoule]

There's something tragic that in normal work I spend a lot of time spinning my gears, eliciting what people really want, dealing with all sorts of entropy in my tools, etc. I've had these rare times where I had a unique vision and was able to be really 100% productive and in those cases I've gotten 0% out of it financially, or so it seems.

To be fair I do have something that's a bit like that in the queue (figured out a conversion from the XSLT universe to the OWL universe that is completely correct) and it looks like I can get some funding for it but thanks to my own screwed-upendess I missed one window for funding and will have to wait till it opens up again.

[rexreed]

It's a common misconception that people pay for value. They pay for perceived value, which isn't the same thing. What might be "useful" or "valuable" often has no value to others. What has value to others might in actuality be worthless on its own merit, but has perceived value to them. This explains the whole "influencer" ecosystem, and how some startups became quick Unicorns while others languished trying to raise even seed funding. There's very little correlation between what one thinks has value and what others value.