I think people have a very weird notion of mastery and think it looks very different in other fields. That’s because mastery no longer looks like mastery once you attain it. Mastery also doesn’t look like the absence of imperfections - even art house films by master auteurs will have imperfections the masters will see and compromises they had to make to get a film done. Talk to a master builder and they’ll instantly start pointing out flaws in buildings. Electrical grids regularly see outages despite.

So my question then is how would you define mastery if you believe our industry doesn’t practice it.

if you have ever “cut corners to meet deadline” is where I’d start

Can you give an example? Every art, industry, or discipline I’ve ever read about has masters doing this.