Wishing he had chosen a path in life like most of his drone buddies who settled down, mated with a queen, had their genitals explode, and then died immediately after?
Can you elaborate on "contracting through recruiters"? Did you respond to recruiters who were reaching out to you with full-time positions and say "no thanks, but what about a contract instead?" If so, do you have any particular strategies for getting to a "yes" with that approach?
Or did you mean that you reached out to recruiters and worked out a finder's fee arrangement if they brought you contracts? If so, how did you find recruiters to work with who weren't already engaged with clients and might therefore have a conflict of interest?
The first versions of Anki (ca 2006) were based on spaced repetition algorithms developed for a piece of software called SuperMemo, which came out 21 years earlier in 1985 [0].
Piotr Wozniak, the author of SuperMemo, writes a lot about spaced repetition and memory in general. What you're describing are basically items 1 and 2 of his "Twenty rules of formulating knowledge" [1]: "Do not learn if you don't understand," and "Learn before you memorize." It's an extremely useful article if you're a heavy Anki user.
This is exactly what Shopify does with their monolithic Rails app [1]. I worked at a company with ~200 engineers that used the same general architecture and I really enjoyed it. We got a lot of the benefits (clear interfaces, teams able to work on their system without having to understand the whole platform, build optimization, etc) without any of the operational headaches that come with microservices.