I don't think anyone has really figured out commercialization in the space yet – us included. The community is still rooted strongly in academia, so commercializing requires a delicate balance between profitability and openness.
I imagine it's what building dev tools was like a couple decades ago. It's fun to see the field grow and evolve.
QIIME is awesome, they have taken on the unenviable task of "dealing with" all those random sub libraries that are from hell.
If you're familiar with Galaxy[0], we used that back in the day and wrote plugins at my lab so we could have researchers use the tools we were building. it feels like that type of 'platform of data + programs" would be easier to monetize. I mean, the workloads are there, people like plug and play, it could use a lot of sprucing up and some paid people to solve the nasty parts.
And yes, I think it's a rite of passage - I mean your own FASTA counter, of course! [1] ;)
[0] https://usegalaxy.org/ [1] https://git.ceux.org/dna-utils.git/
I think this is starting to change. Next-generation sequencers and other imaging devices are causing more wet labs to produce massive amounts of data – which is increasing the number of companies hiring for bioinformatics roles.