Expose yourself to lower level technologies (compilers and optimization techniques, hardware history and design) and let curiosity guide you. Learn how to profile and analyze program performance.
I'm yet to play a game that cost more than tenth of my time I've put into it. A lot of product pricing does not have a factor of "why should I spend time on this?", but entertainment industry is really hard to price for this reason.
Most modern games can be ran 1080p60 on a 5yr old gaming laptop. I also see this sentiment in cycling complaining that some modern bikes cost like a used car. If something is expensive you either don't need it or can get 80% of that for 20% of the cost.
Not every project needs "steam", "momentum", and "moving with the industry". This is the Silicon Valley mentality post is talking about. All of this is VC versus hackers. One side only cares about productivity and profits, other only cares about technical elegance and perfection.
Local authorities might not be happy with civilians painting curbs, fixing potholes, installing road signs. Or I'm not sure what kind of problem we're talking about.
If by layers you mean tiles, you can make a server providing ZXY tile images. Some OSM clients (e.g. BRouter) allow adding custom tile servers for baselayer and overlays.
Long time OM user, just installed CoMaps. Basically the same app, except a few additional features. Increased label size is very nice! I struggle to read street names in OM while on bike.
I had bad experience tracking my bike ride with it on iOS - seems like app offloaded and didn't record half of the track. Strava and OutRun don't have this problem.
https://ivnj.org
https://substepgames.com
https://github.com/ivanjermakov