When I was still discovering the computer and internet world, they were already "giants" in the space, so of course they would seem like the epitome of what I wanted to achieve.

"I want to be like them and be able to do the stuff they do", i.e your standard role model feeling.

Which of course sounds silly once you grow older and realize you can be like them if you study and put the hours on it, but at the time, being so much younger, it just seemed magical.

I compare them to what the movie "Hackers" made me feel. I knew it was a completely fantastical representation of what hackers actually were (and you could even argue it was a bad-ish movie), but the fact that I could imagine myself being able to break into a TV network and putting the show of my choosing felt like magic. I guess it's the analogue to what Dungeons and Dragons was for a lot of people, imagining being a wizard and killing dragons.

So while I agree with you that they were just a group of people that got together to share knowledge and explore this new frontier, it was so ahead of what I could achieve at the time that it was hard not to look up to them.

Kind of how I (and I would guess, a lot of other HNers) look up to what you (and e.g. Project Zero engineers) can do with security and cryptography stuff :)

It's not that I think I'm not capable or competent enough to do it, just that I haven't walked the thousand miles you have. But of course, I'm now an adult that can rationalize these things, instead of an impressionable kid with dreams of grandeur :).

It has, though basically every one of the now-respectable-looking professional security outfits you could point to has one or more of these late 80s early 90s "mystique era" hackers working for it (and I can probably tell you what their old bbs handle and/or irc nick was).