My personal opinion is that the average person is struggling not to die of obesity or become diabetic, not be massively in debt, take reasonably good care of th

My personal opinion is that the average person is struggling not to die of obesity or become diabetic, not be massively in debt, take reasonably good care of their kids, attain a reasonable level of education, etc. So from this perspective nobody really cares about a computer programmer getting to do an interesting project for a year. As for government funding for interesting projects, the way you get these is submitting research proposals to the NSF or something. Unfortunately I think it’s rare for them to give you money if you’re not a university professor or something. As I understand it there are similar public and private grants for artists but you probably have to be pretty good already to get one.