It is not you; it is the landscape of the programming world that has changed. Programmers get hooked on the craft because they can make stuff that scratches their own itches in a way that they are proud of. You could do that back when you thought it was adequate to make an adventure game that combined text with graphic images at a specific resolution that worked on your computer.
But then you became a student of the "right" way of doing things, and learned that it was suboptimal to just hard-code your strings into stacks of if/else blocks and had to figure out how to work them into a resource segment of your binary, and then along the way oh if you access them using the generated code functions that some IDEs will give you for those, then you get the ability to access them for different languages depending on...oh how DOES the runtime determine what language the user prefers? Hmmm let's look that up, so for versions 1.0-2.x it will look at the thread's current culture, hmmm how does THAT get set, and then what about 3.0+ okay let's just forget stupid translations for now, let's just make these graphics ready to work on different screen resolutions and retina displays so time to find out how to make SVGs and a UX library that will let you easily insert those when needed but oh the only good one is a full framework so you've got to refactor your whole code and provide a manifest file and hey what happens if I set this "Resolution" property to "UseNative" vs. "UseScreen"? What does that mean? Oh hello StackOverflow thank you and uh oh...I CAN use UseScreen but I will need to provide my own custom implementation of IScreenProvider which is almost as long as my original adventure game code, but thank you contributor, I can just copy your whole page of code into my own project. Since none of the names match my convention, I'll just spend the next hour renaming, retesting, and experimenting with which chaff I can cut out of this pretty-suspiciously-complicated class I just copied.
There is a certain class of programmer whom this kind of experience absolutely does not bother. I call them "zombies", but in the modern programming world, they are called "successful". They will tell you that they can easily do their job in a reasonable-length day, and have no desire to do programming projects at home.
But Excel, Doom, Linux, Mosaic...all these were not made by zombies. They were made by people like you, but in a time when there was no programming culture that made you worry that everything you were doing was wrong. It's just different now. That's probably why the world supplies 1000x as many programmers as back then, but contributes about 1/1000th the old output of really good stuff. Mostly we just provide the same stuff that was available 25 years ago, but on top of a different and more complicated set of foundational services.
But then you became a student of the "right" way of doing things, and learned that it was suboptimal to just hard-code your strings into stacks of if/else blocks and had to figure out how to work them into a resource segment of your binary, and then along the way oh if you access them using the generated code functions that some IDEs will give you for those, then you get the ability to access them for different languages depending on...oh how DOES the runtime determine what language the user prefers? Hmmm let's look that up, so for versions 1.0-2.x it will look at the thread's current culture, hmmm how does THAT get set, and then what about 3.0+ okay let's just forget stupid translations for now, let's just make these graphics ready to work on different screen resolutions and retina displays so time to find out how to make SVGs and a UX library that will let you easily insert those when needed but oh the only good one is a full framework so you've got to refactor your whole code and provide a manifest file and hey what happens if I set this "Resolution" property to "UseNative" vs. "UseScreen"? What does that mean? Oh hello StackOverflow thank you and uh oh...I CAN use UseScreen but I will need to provide my own custom implementation of IScreenProvider which is almost as long as my original adventure game code, but thank you contributor, I can just copy your whole page of code into my own project. Since none of the names match my convention, I'll just spend the next hour renaming, retesting, and experimenting with which chaff I can cut out of this pretty-suspiciously-complicated class I just copied.
There is a certain class of programmer whom this kind of experience absolutely does not bother. I call them "zombies", but in the modern programming world, they are called "successful". They will tell you that they can easily do their job in a reasonable-length day, and have no desire to do programming projects at home.
But Excel, Doom, Linux, Mosaic...all these were not made by zombies. They were made by people like you, but in a time when there was no programming culture that made you worry that everything you were doing was wrong. It's just different now. That's probably why the world supplies 1000x as many programmers as back then, but contributes about 1/1000th the old output of really good stuff. Mostly we just provide the same stuff that was available 25 years ago, but on top of a different and more complicated set of foundational services.