Back when I was "playing" (in the dismissive sense) at being physicist and physics teacher, what I found was that the secret to actually understanding something was being free to fiddle with the parameters of the thing to try to dive a preferred outcome. That's more or less the mission statement of Bell Labs in its heyday.

I don't understand how you can exist in this space (that is, Hackernews and the larger startup culture) while being dismissive of folks out there exploring their particular parameter spaces, outside of practical constraints.