And the thing here, software is simple. You take bits in, do stuff, and then its bits out. State machines there. Disks over there. Algorithms in hand. There is no real end to understanding all the details, but the game is well understood in a very reductive manner.
There is the game that we study which is making these infernal machines do useful things. Then, there is the meta game of getting humans to do things with these infernal games. These games are infinite and mastery demands you to see them for the games that they are.
In this, there is no plateau. You can operate with peak resources to explore, but the game is the game to play.
You should understand high level abstractions that run our lives or software.
But then as well you should understand that a lot of people are not having time/will/capacity to understand high level abstractions that are interesting for you.
I get angry mostly because people are not caring to understand - that is why everyone wants to build greenfield projects instead of maintaining existing ones.
It is just like person trying to open a lock with key for the first time on the old gate, they try to force it while they could wiggle the key a bit to find the correct position.
I owned couple of old cars and if you put a little bit of care and understanding they will drive perfectly well, even with check engine LED on :)
The same with team of people - don't expect that they will understand your "perfect world" just try to wiggle a bit so you can improve things enough so they work. Because what is important is getting job done and not having "prefect" world.
And the thing here, software is simple. You take bits in, do stuff, and then its bits out. State machines there. Disks over there. Algorithms in hand. There is no real end to understanding all the details, but the game is well understood in a very reductive manner.
There is the game that we study which is making these infernal machines do useful things. Then, there is the meta game of getting humans to do things with these infernal games. These games are infinite and mastery demands you to see them for the games that they are.
In this, there is no plateau. You can operate with peak resources to explore, but the game is the game to play.