With Greater Sadness...
I've gotten, to my surprise, a few sympathetic comments and similar agreeances regarding my previous post lamenting that I've not yet created my Important Work, such as the Lord of the Rings. Steve Mallet responds:
I feel this way now. I really thought I was forging a trail in my work with open source, but I was really just at the front of the train. While that is fine for being a bit of a soothsayer it does little to appease the artist's heart for truly creating something beautiful.
One small consolation is that Tolkien was in his sixties when Lord of the Rings was finally "finished" and published, so I've got a good thirty more years of soul searching, excellence striving, grieving, and then pitiful acceptance of my fate. Kick ass.