I do understand him. He probably cares about none of these things, and for all things he does care he probably saw a library or framework or something similar. This gives him false impression that there's nothing more to do, or at least it requires great cleverness to think something up.

I take my ideas from my job. I mostly think of myself as a sysadmin, but I write in several languages, I'm interested in data processing (which leads me to various places, like topic maps, indexing semi-structured data, or event stream processing), and I see what we have to work with logs, with monitoring, with infrastructure inventory, and with documentation. This gives plenty of projects to improve my field, I just don't have the energy to carry them all out.