...you can. Just the other day was an article on HN about SVG, in that world there are only a few people that are making it work and holding the working groups

...you can. Just the other day was an article on HN about SVG, in that world there are only a few people that are making it work and holding the working groups together. I have a feeling that if you were really good at SVG and doing stuff where you had no man pages then you could be welcomed into the SVG inner circle and start putting your ideas and efforts into shaping vector graphics for the web going forward. You can also do something similar, at your own level and with your own pace - my near octogenarian father has had his commits accepted by the Drupal people, which I was impressed by as he had to learn things like PHP for that. Sounds like you want more than to just work on someone else's app, so upstream 'defining' the web, look at what is happening in worlds like SVG, or if that does not seem like 'as fun as Lego was' to you then find some other area that you can learn/master/push on from.