Why not have controls in your program to do these immediate, non-logic changing modifications? It can report the ideal value through a debug interface. No recompiles needed.
I'd also recommend getting used to serialisation/deserialisation. Serde for Rust makes this remarkably easy. Writing every setting to a file is simple if the compiler can do it for you, rather than you walking the long way around.
Assuming you can learn anything from the experience. What you might learn is weird idiosyncrasies and futile tactics playing from desperation. You might learn to not lose so quickly, but that's not the same as winning.
Do you feel it's likely that he's created something that works and rather than using or elaborating upon his work, and thus bettering their own career, everyone has thought, "Wait a second, isn't this the Palm Pilot guy?" and discarded the idea?
Instead of just cutting out the middle bit of getting a PhD, becoming a professor, setting up a research lab, and mentoring students for decades, and leaping straight to "make a startup from an idea that works", every single person decided to go the hard road because it seems proper?
Your cargo cult idea works - he's arranged all the trappings of being an influential theorist - funding and research labs and media coverage - except perhaps for the one thing that lets him fly: a worthwhile idea.
Org mode with some fairly well-worn templates. My daily log is in datetree format. I have a few agenda options so at my weekly meeting I can get a quick review of what I've done during the week (or quarter if I'm writing quarterly notes).
If I go to a meeting I take notes with pen and paper and transfer them in elaborated form when I return. Good note taking is a skill, though!
I dabbled with an ultra quick template (F12 to write a single line in a mega list with a date stamp at the front of each item, no options, no slowdown). I found the discipline of taking slow notes at the end of every task or day much better than effectively tweeting my day to my future self.
One thing that I've found difficult is having task/project journals that work easily into this flow. Tags help but I found I was duplicating everything in changelogs.
What would be your plan for papers that cite another one because they are doing a literature review or something akin to "Paper X is wrong"?
There's also a trickier problem in your simple binary flag: papers can have incorrect proofs of correct statements.
I'd love to see a Semantic Web approach where you don't cite papers but results in papers. So while a result in a paper might be wrong, you don't have to throw out all the results in all the papers citing this paper.
If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims. Papers, source code, numbers. Not "we have the biggest, baddest GPU farm" and refuse to say any more as policy. Under this veil of secrecy and doubletalk, all they have is marketing: Trust the brand rather than objective reality.
Many other companies are mature enough to show their cards but Apple keeps declaring victory. Apple writes its own narrative instead of participating.
There are mature ways for this to shake out and they don't include your strawman dichotomy.
I think it's more a password manager that doesn't manage passwords.
You can't set an expiry date on a password. You can't change a password if it's compromised. You don't know when a master password was created so you can change it. If you change your master password you have to change every password you care about. You can't introduce new entropy. You have to manually specify a keyword scheme (and presumably store it yourself). You can't store metadata in case the website decides it's changed from usernames to email addresses and you've forgotten which one you used for what. You can't change the master password independently of the individual passwords.
In actual password management, this program makes you specify, store and organize it all yourself. And without significantly more security than a traditional password manager like Keepass.