I believe you are in team 'haven't found my true talent/calling yet' and it won't necessarily be artistic. You can have talent for many things and you don't have to call anything art.
Regarding Leonardo, and big brains won't like this: a great artist such as Leonardo can become an imaginative engineer as a hobby. The inverse is not true.
> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues.
Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.
Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.
Use JUCE as much as you like, but please, stay away from those 'out-of-the-box' horizontal sliders it seems to prioritize (given how they swarm in the many VSTs made with JUCE).
If sliders are vertical in the real world, there’s a reason for it that Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini summarizes perfectly:
“Most of us […] have our forarms mounted on a pivot we like to call our elbow. That means that moving our hand describes an arc, rather than a straight line. Demanding that pivoted people move a mouse pointer along in a straight line horizontally is just wrong.”
You think the real world has nothing better to do than test your shitty code?