I guess the part which confused me the most was where you talked about people running low damage builds. I was picturing people deliberately building low damage specs for some reason, but you were just talking about people who don't know enough about the game to actually bother learning how things work?

It's funny to me, because I actually held the world record for top dps in WoW:TBC, but after that I spent years playing with many different types of players to try and understand why some people exceed while others struggle, because I didn't think my innate abilities were THAT much greater than others. My conclusion is that it's largely about priorities, which you seem to have also noticed. Some people had good priorities, such as family taking their time and attention, but many more seemed to simply not try, because they told themselves they weren't good enough for one reason or another. The one that sticks out in my head was a particularly talented girl who was convinced that her hands were too small to reach all the hotkeys.

All that aside though, there is another dynamic I've noticed which plays a significant role in how and why gaming has become what it is: People have been wasting entirely too much time with it. I believe quite strongly that much of our problems today stem from talented people spending their time playing games rather than engaging in the other roles important to the continuing function of society. Now, no small part of that can be attributed to how our society currently functions, in my mind, where the demands imposed upon people who seek to perform such important roles have become immensely more onerous at the same time as entertainment media has become much more engaging. Yet still, we do need those who are able to actually take on these challenges if we intend for our civilization to survive the turn of the age.

Frankly, for as many bad actors that take advantage of our state of affairs to push their own short sighted agendas, I can also see much reason for good people to feel disdain towards those who decline to participate in more important matters because they're occupied with games. So while I definitely can agree with how terrible this state of affairs is for gaming, and I do believe rather strongly that it has a greater negative impact upon society as a whole than what is reasonable, I think that people need to recognize that gaming should not be a way of life for those who are actually capable of serving society in a greater capacity. Recent generations have grown up with the mentality that technological automation will "free" us to spend our time however we choose, yet that is not how things have worked out in actual practice. Instead we have just seen a mass abdication of social responsibility leading to opening up doors for anyone with a motive to seek power in the vacuums which now exist, and wicked who can not rest lest they be set upon by good people who take exception to their depravity are gobbling up all the opportunity.