[lnanek2]

> People win by making "cool" apps (Uber for X) whereas technical hacks are totally ignored.

I think a hack is worthless if you can't get regular people interested in it, so technical hacks are rightly failing. If you ever start doing indie app dev you'll learn the same thing. It's easy to write esoteric technical tools and apps targeted at developers. It's difficult to write something that will achieve mass adoption and actually get a lot of usage. The latter has a lot more impact on the world as well.

Even in industry the strong preference is for solutions that string two APIs together as you say, rather than difficult technical solutions like you seem to be advocating. Software Engineering advocates using libraries and services over writing more code because it improves various metrics like maintenance, enhancement, defects, etc..