"my assumption is that whatever they hate is simply the same thing they fear in themselves."

Hold on. It's late where I am, I'm tired, and this might be me performing some kind of logically fallacy but: are you saying that if I hate Paris Hilton I'm actually internally scared of being an airhead who gets far more publicity than she deserves?

I think saying "what you're doing is stupid because X" is pointless, navel-focused and unproductive, though not necessarily even remotely wrong.

Here's what I'd like: I'd like instead for a discussion to take place on exactly what areas we can write code in that changes the world in a useful and laudable way.

The medical imaging example is sort of interesting, because I've worked on hospital software before and the biggest challenge has nothing to do with writing code, it has to do with politics and money. I've occasionally thought of apps that you could build and run in a hospital (watch HL7 traffic and send alerts when probable bad things happen, e.g. patients get prescribed too much drugs / odd medications), but again: writing the code is not the hard part, getting it into hospitals is.

I'd like to know what problems I can help solve now, where the main problem is actually writing code.