Funny enough, after an interview I had yesterday where it sounds like they're going to reject me for "culture fit" reasons, I kind of came to the conclusion that fulltime jobs and even direct contracting isn't for me anymore. It was for a security engineer job where my "I may have actually convinced comcast to start a bug bounty program after disclosing a major security hole over the phone." story got no reaction. Not entirely sure what I'll do, but freelancing lately has been pretty enjoyable. Then again, I don't know how long that's doable. You sound like you're going down the same route I am with work, long break, work, long break and you're right that those projects get almost no attention. That lack of attention is getting me further and further from wanting to do programming/IT for a living and to just use the knowledge as tools for other things. If you're interested in it, try doing civics work and hammer your city/state with FOIA requests to get things you're interested in. You might find that the "rabbit holes" there are surprisingly exciting.

If you're ever in Chicago, hit me up and we can grab some drinks.