Problem/Truth is that writing toy software is not profitable - that's not to say one must always work on profitable things; what i mean is that it's being kept unprofitable, because in a hyper-saturated monopolized attention economy, every piece of "toy" software that isn't a video game or a plugin to some proprietary app ecosystem is essentially an act of subversion, an attempted "theft" or piracy of what the Company considers its rightful property: the sum of all disposable human attention.
That sounds as good a reason as any to become a pirate, frankly