most restaurants are absolutely terrible value for money.
Low and behold it is actually fun to cook. It is actually more fun to be able to make a new dish yourself than to try a new restaurant. It is amusing how everything DIY is cool in hacker culture besides cooking. For no reason besides custom, people pretend they just don't have time to cook or that learning to cook isn't worth it. It is an obviously thoughtless idea.
Having less time to doom scroll your phone is a feature and not a bug.
> Especially if you're anything above a 7/10 home cook
I'd move your assessment down to a 5/10 home cook.
Most restaurants are using ingredients of sufficiently low quality that it is now pathetically easy to beat them on that axis. Using even slightly better ingredients than average puts you ahead of 90% of restaurants, nowadays--even for something as stupidly easy as a salad.
I'm super lazy, but local restaurants have gotten both so expensive and so slow that I'm always weighing whether to hit the local grocery store, grab some ingredients and throw something together at home.
The way people that don't cook talk about cooking you would think it is on the level of work involved in roofing or pouring cement blocks.
I am literally cooking a Thai dish right now. I could have went to the Thai restaurant but tinkering with this dish is actually more fun.