Yeah, I thought maybe everyone was being negative but wow. It’s _sad_ to think of music moving towards this “revival” style. More a wake than a revival. The death of human music.
I think building a business is hard, and people that succeed at it (in a generally non-harmful way) are impressive. Setting out to build a business and succeeding, as opposed to stumbling into it unawares, is indeed more impressive to me, I think.
Maybe you came off as too far above the grind? People that have recently been in more VPE/director type roles often don’t succeed at returning to IC work (or at least, hiring managers believe this).