Grass is always greener. You don't know the counterfactual and you would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well.
This is correct. When I was at Allstate they had a 'labs' team to come up with innovative new technology. They were the only ones with standing desks, treadmill desks, bicycle desks, and over two years the only thing they accomplished was design a phone holder for a bicycle.
They had much greater success using Kaggle for data science competitions in terms of innovation.