You're right. And the paths that creativity follows in the unconstrained case are important. Sometimes they lead to dead ends, and sometimes to new things that never would have gotten started otherwise.

I sometimes think of a distinction between the engineering way and the hacker way. Both are good, and the two are related, but they aren't the same. If HN has a purpose in the world it surely is to champion the latter, whose mottos are "gratifying curiosity" and "just because". By "the engineering way" I mean creativity operating under economic or organizational constraints that demand justification and exclude the whimsical. You end up with different projects and products that way.

But I don't think matmann2001 was being critical—just eager to share the cool details of their own ambient lighting setup, which is an excellent thing to do and squarely on the hacker side of this distinction.

You captured my sentiments well. I found OP's project extremely impressive and I never meant to detract from the hard work he put into it. When I was designing my own system, doing HDMI decoding on an FPGA was an option I considered. But HDCP (a from of DRM encryption on HDMI signals) was the deal breaker. Although there has been some recent research on MITM attacks to break HDCP, it's currently beyond my budget and patience.

It's much easier to sidestep HDCP altogether, which can be done with a simple AV converter.

Absolutely agree. There's a place for both pragmatism and the artistic nature of unconstrained hacking in both the work you do for people and and side-project hacking.

There's a balance that every hacker has to find. Sometimes it's good to just get something out the door, sometimes you've invented an excuse to learn technology X. :)

That's exactly what I tell people who argue that I could have bought three windmills for the money I spent on building one.