Comment by dominicdoty

I think the counter to this would be that if you focused on the "listen to a song I want right away" problem - you would have invented Spotify. From a business perspective inventing Spotify is probably better than inventing bittorrent. Elegant solutions are lovely, but often miss the problem people wanted to solve. Sometimes a useful product is built on top of an elegant solution e.g. WireGuard vs Tailscale. Seems similar to academic research vs engineering. Both useful, different goals/outcomes.