Fully agree. The problems are hard, the interested talent is limited (who would want to work on line of business software when academia actively pushes people towards other things), and the problem space (all possible online business configurations) is immense.
Re:frontend, you're absolutely correct. Magento's frontend is a sad state. MageOS is actively looking for ways to move Luma/Blank into a separate installable package so that devs are not forced to see it at every turn.
In terms of Headless, there are a bunch of different heads at this point, but none have yet solved what I call the "upgrade-safe theme" problem.
I like what we've done with Daffodil since it doesn't impose any of those limitations that come with themes, while still handling a lot of the complexity that devs face when building ecommerce stores.
Ignoring academia - what's the value for a business minded tech person to stay in the Magento world? I'm surely not the only M2 tech lead type who's jumped ship off to greener pastures.
Businesses will always have commerce problems, so you're pretty stable in terms of consistent income.
If you can make a name for yourself, you can do very well. Especially for Magento, I love the fact that I can make small change, deliver it as a composer package, and then (if the code is good enough) see the results on many brands within a few months.
It's hard to get that close-to-customer visibility anywhere else as most "cool" large scale FOSS projects are dev focused, which means your impact on the lay user is less obvious.
Re:frontend, you're absolutely correct. Magento's frontend is a sad state. MageOS is actively looking for ways to move Luma/Blank into a separate installable package so that devs are not forced to see it at every turn.
In terms of Headless, there are a bunch of different heads at this point, but none have yet solved what I call the "upgrade-safe theme" problem.
I like what we've done with Daffodil since it doesn't impose any of those limitations that come with themes, while still handling a lot of the complexity that devs face when building ecommerce stores.