You could pretty much say the same thing about Carmack. He just kept making the same doom and quake game over and over with better and better tech. Carmack's space company venture didn't work out, then he went to work at Oculus where he couldn't get anyone to listen to him and got frustrated and left. Now he's at some AI startup.
In some ways Romero actually saved ID software and made everyone a ton of money by working out licensing deals for their game engines. Carmack wouldn't be able to continue to work on his tech and hire Abrash (who optimized Carmack's code) without the money coming out of these deals so he unfairly complained that Romero wasn't pulling his weight for the current project and treated him like crap until he got fed up and left.
I think people are missing the point of these “mixed reality” headsets. They’re really prototypes for AR glasses. Basically in the future they want to replace your phone with glasses with some kind of waveguide that can composite 3d objects into the real world. We have the waveguide tech and 3000nit lcos micro led displays already but just don’t have the processing power in a package small enough to fit in a pair of glasses.
Actually it happened way before 1970 when Dodge sued Ford.
Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919) is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a charitable manner for the benefit of his employees or customers.
I used to be like you. I stay on top of cpp con talks, I read Meyers and Andrescu's books and I had some fun side projects and I do fine at work, regular promotions, etc, but I did incredibly badly during interviews. I wasn't sure if it's some kind of IQ thing because I know people who can answer those CS questions without studying but I took the advice of some friends and I spent months grinding leetcode style questions. After a while something in my brain clicked and since then I've gotten a ton of job offers and worked at two FAANGs.
In some ways Romero actually saved ID software and made everyone a ton of money by working out licensing deals for their game engines. Carmack wouldn't be able to continue to work on his tech and hire Abrash (who optimized Carmack's code) without the money coming out of these deals so he unfairly complained that Romero wasn't pulling his weight for the current project and treated him like crap until he got fed up and left.