> But I felt no accomplishment. It felt just the same as if I downloaded the tool from someone else's repo (and who had an overly eager maintainer that would implement my GitHub issue requests).
I get that. I recently watched a "talking head" style video by javid9x, where he said something along the lines of disconnecting from the code emotionally [0]. He has to get into the code to understand that. I get the same feeling, however, for me, it feeds my curiosity and my need of exploration. At least for now, I might add.