That speaks more about the people you're surrounded by than it does the incredible people actually doing the very interesting work of developing the bitcoin ecosystem behind the scenes.

It is a shame that your only exposure to the space comes from pump monkeys who don't understand that a blockchain is barely more than a distributed linked list (hell, it's basically just glorified git) and the real innovation was not the data structure, but the integration of proof of work to create Byzantine fault tolerance.

I'm pretty sure the only difference between a Merkle tree and an Oak is the theoretically infinite branching. Is that right? /s