The two big boss fights are the closest thing to a "goal," but yeah, even in survival mode I guess it's as much lego as it is video game. In your case, maybe a Bethesda game but focusing on side and companion quests until you're so overpowered that wrapping up the main plot will feel like one more.
A lot of the very few surviving samples do of course look really primitive, but at the high end, cobblers in the Roman world were not fuckin' around.
UC28327 here is a pretty ornate sole with a very modern shape.
The upper on this one must have been super nice when new.
Then, there's no reason to suppose that Marcus Aurelius' (and/or Hadrian's) sandals on their statues were idealized past the point of plausibility, though I'm sure once one government contracted statue with approved Imperial sandals gets made, there's a temptation to stick with the motif regardless of the current Emperor's footwear preferences.
Maybe how angsty you were feeling when the internet arrived in your town? I dunno. It feels very appropriate though, that the forgotten gen X would spawn its own even more liminal sub/pseudo group.
Seems like what a lot of people want is a hybrid of Usenet and Reddit, but what we have is more like a bunch of reddits that are willing to talk to each other. Certainly better for governance and redundancy and as a kind of organic load balancing in a cash-poor ecosystem, but the "killer app" would be (optional?) persistence of communities outside of instances.
A pretty large portion of the kits, components, and pre-built boards are from "obscure" Chinese companies already, so much of what you'd want is just sort of... there. As a single example, get a GMK67 for $35, 70 Milky Yellow switches (if you're into linears. I am not.) for $20, and maybe a YMDK set of keycaps for $30-$50, and you've got a very presentable budget build under a hundred bucks. If you go hunting, you can probably find stuff you'd like just as much for even cheaper.
I left it absolutely invigorated and optimistic for the franchise. I saw it had some flaws, with one sizeable one being that it should have ignored the cliffhanger in TFA and caught up 6-12 months later*; the OT (and less successfully, the PT) got to handwave a LOT of character development by simply letting life happen offscreen. Still, TLJ took a needlessly derivative setup from TFA and set the stage for a much more interesting Episode Nine than we got, and I utterly disagree that he didn't get or like Star Wars. Shit, Rian Johnson is the only one who was willing to SAY the words "Darth Sidious."
I thought he gave a thoughtful fan's perspective on what Star Wars needs to be to remain relevant, the theme of growing from failure being particularly well done for a big popcorn franchise. The scene with Rose's sister, the Yoda scene, the acting from Adam Driver after the throne room scene? All peak Star Wars IMHO. Then of course TROS came along and was so clumsy and petty in how it blew up Rian Johnson's new directions, and so generally messy, that it didn't even please the people who hated TLJ.
TFA was useful as a palate cleanser for the generation who rejected the PT, and it gave us a compelling new batch of heroes and villains (Snoke honestly being the least interesting as a character), but it didn't really DO much, and its worldbuilding was absolutely retrograde. TLJ was a needed course correction, but Disney not only recoiled from the backlash, but took all the wrong lessons from it even if it did need to affect the direction of Ep9. JJ was, in the end, very wrong for Star Wars, though if TFA was his only one, it might not have been so obvious.
*-Two others being the framing device of the "slow speed chase" and Finn's arc being such a minor step forward . A few tweaks to the technobabble or moving them to Crait earlier and having it be a bit more of a formidable facility could have helped the first one, and having Finn more explicitly trying to save Rey and Poe at the cost of the Resistance might have better highlighted the additional layer of growth RJ was thought he still needed.
True, but there is an almost childlike literalism to the small amount that is unique about Mormon theology, plus it all arose in the era of the printing press and governmental archives, so there are fewer excuses. It's also culturally very top down and high pressure, as you are keenly aware. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the mainline LDS church a cult, but it's definitely closer than, say, the Episcopalians.