I understand the point your making in an attempt to bridge the gap

olympic athlete - Already mostly accomplished. If I've worked on an application I believed had value but failed to display that value to users, did it actually have value? If a tree made of pure gold falls in the forest and no one finds it, it may be valuable but unless discovered it's it served no usefulness. 

However gold is a bad analog because we exist in a world where it's common knowledge of the value of gold and takes almost no risk in the same way. 

Maybe a better analog would be the mine-safe lantern. If I spent years building a life-saving device, well it clearly has the objective ability to save lives, but if it fails to get used in place of legacy fire lamps did it have value? The original product and designer are not actually the adopted product, the person who sold it better is the winner (arguably most products). An equivalent might be that activity-pub becomes the winner over nostr. Application specific time was wasted and product design has almost no congruence, I can't take hardly any of the work I've done with nostr there.  

 To be clear I believe this is far from a pessimistic view. I believe it's motivating, in sort of a burn the boats in a way, but to pretend it's not a massive risk in a time sink is a false belief. 

 The time I could have spent looking for contract work or applying for jobs, updating my website, whatever,  is spent instead working on projects or libraries that are generally of no use to fiat companies, in fact any relation to crypto anything can often a turn off.