[walrus01]

Neither are the nycmesh people, who seem to have a fair bit of hobby-grade fun in doing what they do in their spare time, but the end result of their hard work provides significantly greater real-world end to end communication systems for people to use... If the purpose of amateur radio is to communicate, DXing and such doesn't really accomplish much real world utility.

No, not everything in the world has to be utilitarian or accomplish a purpose. But amateur radio is continually living in the past, their entire communication paradigm is often based on something akin to circuit-switched networking when the packet based networking world passed them by quite some years ago.