What’s the problem with nerd sniping? It’s fun, and something useful may come out of it. I’d like to say that I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t need to “forcefully progress” anymore, but truthfully that was never actually the case. I came to be where I am because I was following a passion, so it was all nerd sniping with useful side effects, I guess.
The problem with nerd sniping is that it is instant gratification in a way. Always focusing on tech and math problems because you like solving them can lead to neglecting other areas. But maybe learning more about those other areas could lead to better success in life. At least this is my experience. It solved itself in my case. My interest just shifted to be more end-product focused gradually.
Though I feel that I can usually tell whether some product's internals and engineering, and not just what it's meant to represent from the outside, have been a "labor of love" as well, or whether it's been cobbled together to just fit some particular outcome. The former is usually more robust, thought through, stable, and generally better to work with.
I don't know how much that applies to games. I guess it depends on the genre. I can imagine that for some games, playtesting and bugfixing gets you to a good state. But for some roguelikes for example, especially ones where there is a large amount of things to combine (so where playtesting just cannot test every combination), I can imagine that "artful engineering" are beneficial for the games' stability and polish. Those are games that are meant to be played over, and over, and over again, in different ways.
