So the TLDR is if you invest a lot of effort, you could win a game that doesn't matter, that you don't care about, all to impress people you don't care about?

Its a good article in that if you've already decided to do something like it, FF is a sort of interesting, unusual choice.

One minor failing of the article is failing to deal with the issue of FF being extremely slow paced. Like playing pac man by submitting punch card jobs on an ancient mainframe.