Especially amongst programmers the feeling of constantly pushing boundaries and grinding to a new unexplored territory is far more interesting than working on practical “tame” solutions. See for instance the amount of people who spend tons of time hacking at and opening up platforms for GNU/Linux that are poor fits for the OS. It would make far more practical sense for say Marcan to spend his time working on the Linux kernel more directly than playing around with Apple devices that are made to burn out in a year and become ewaste. However, he feels more satisfaction working on that “new frontier”, regardless of its practicality.