everything is a triviality if taken sufficiently out of scope

I get what you're saying, and for a long time I managed to convince myself it was true.

But.

Looking back at my life, the things I got done barely register on the radar compared to the joy of learning and creating, the joy of hacking.

Counter point: as I get older, I find it harder and harder to put up with annoying little nags in the software I use (iow, I have less patience for crap). And boy does software today have a ton of that. I think I'm just about to cross the point where I'll dump the default gnome setup on my work laptop (ubuntu) and install dwm or cwm or whatever. Even with all the tweaking and customization, it doesn't take that long, but it makes work more comfortable every hour, every day, for years to come.

It's like ergonomics. When you're a kid, you sit on what you have and you've got more interesting things to worry about than the height of your desk? At some point in life you might just want a nice chair and roomy adjustable desk with a sizeable external monitor on a proper adjustable stand to make work comfortable. That's why you hack your window manager or shell or whatever. The defaults are always terrible and not tailored for you.