There’s a lot to talk about from this point alone, but I’ll be brief: having gone through university courses on processor design and cutting my teeth on fighting people for a single bit in memory, I’m probably a lot more comfortable with that minutia than most; having written my first few lines of C in 10 years to demo a basic memory safety bug just an hour ago, you’re way way ahead of me.
There are different ways to learn and gain experience and each path will train us in different skills. Then we build teams around that diversity.
An open source-ish corporate product is valuable in so much as it’s a vehicle for a paid service, right?