I wish people felt the same about going to space as I do. I think that if we were more knowledge focused as a species that we'd be racing to the stars which would mean an insanely different mentality than the 'tow the line' kind of thing I think we have nowadays.
It depends on if you are happy with the state of things as they are. I would think that if all of humanity was content, and not a single soul was unhappy then we would stop the analysis. But so long as our minds can imagine a newer 'better' reality, i.e. so long as the grass is always greener on the other side: We will act this way.
I PERSONALLY decided if it seems like 20-25% probability, this is 'likely' because it means I can accomplish it if I can try 4-5 times. If it is 1%, I'd have to attempt 100 times to make a thing happen.
Credit where it is deserved. Span is a great idea, and building fixed sized streams on top of them is a great idea (I haven't read it, but I assume this is the thing they're going after).
Ok, beautiful and highly optimized code needs to be a standard in my opinion. If it is genuinely well written, it simultaneously teaches new comers good habits (implicit training), and makes future modifications that much easier. These are time savers. Time is money. It is a money saver.
Conclusion: Beautiful and optimized code is a money saver.
One addendum: Optimized code results in a performant application. This means you are better than a competing product that accomplishes the same thing but at a slower speed. You've maybe heard: 'performance is a feature' for this reason. This, one COULD argue, is a direct money maker.
You can then tack on words like 'slick', 'snappy', etc. to your list of descriptors.