That's the thing, I think a lot of those are, if not solved, problems where there's a lot of really well established good solutions that exist.
I could, I guess, tackle them. But I've got an appreciation that what's already there is already pretty great.
I suppose that's maybe the answer to my question. You don't need to be 1% to solve a problem as well as the solutions that already exist.
You need to be the 1% to improve on the current state of the art.
Which in a commercial environment, as you can imagine, is exceptionally rare. They are more about finding unsolved problems than iterating on problems already solved by FOSS.
For various reasons (usually control, but frequently spun as "needing to be cutting edge"), some groups or companies do reinvent those wheels and in some lucky cases we get progress. For example Google has recreated several of those things and especially in the data storage field they've probably moved things forward.
But in general I agree with you, the crushing majority of developers out there won't work on those things and won't ever even need to.
It's also a source of not always deserved elitism from the people that work on those things, and I definitely dislike that (there's enough elitism in this field, as-is).
Elitism is driven by ego and self actualization though.
I think there's a lot of people who are highly, highly motivated to work on tough problems with competent co-workers.
Those emotions are less driven by the domain itself, and more about the fact that those people have succeeded in finding meaningful work with co-workers of appreciable worth.
The tricky thing I find is finding that. Far too many regular projects are focused on mobilizing the dumbest blocks of wood towards a goal. Without actually investing in the human beings doing the work.
I think once we regain a culture of actually investing in people who aren't in the top 10% in their field, things can change. Currently though we do not have that culture.
I could, I guess, tackle them. But I've got an appreciation that what's already there is already pretty great.
I suppose that's maybe the answer to my question. You don't need to be 1% to solve a problem as well as the solutions that already exist.
You need to be the 1% to improve on the current state of the art.
Which in a commercial environment, as you can imagine, is exceptionally rare. They are more about finding unsolved problems than iterating on problems already solved by FOSS.