I had always assumed that change was part of the character’s arc. At the start he is a by the books commander and by the end he talks with 5 dimensions aliens, believes he is one chosen to guide a planet full of people and is willing to toss out his morals to manipulate other great powers.
Well said. There are so many details to making code work that can so often be avoided by using the right tooling. OP said it was harder to get started, which implies they did not handle the details and have code not actually robust to all kinds of edge cases. Maybe they don’t need it but they probably do.