Supervised Full Self-Driving seems like a euphemism for driving with a driving instructor. You fully drive yourself but someone supervises you while you do it.
I was one of those people too and the academic environment was honestly depressing. Almost none of the professors actually cared about the topics they taught, only about the ones that were their research subjects, on the topics they taught many were stuck at the state the introductory topics were at when they first graduated themselves (in IT where everything changes much more quickly than that). Many university wide decisions were nonsensical (e.g. teach memory management in OS classes in Java because Java was the language they standardized on for everything due to industry pressure). For Bachelor topics they only wanted to accept topics where you could tell you would basically spend months to write something that would end up in the round filing cabinet once it had served its grading purpose. Questions in larger classes were highly discouraged, even pointing out mistakes in the lecture materials (obvious indisputable ones that shouldn't hurt anyone's ego like some typo in the order of digits) got responses that discouraged doing that again.
The term bulimia learning has been used for well over a decade now to describe that cramming before an exam only to immediately forget all of it afterwards too. Testing in education is fundamentally broken and has been for a long time.
Not just Americans, the British political class has similar issues.
Then you probably won't like the thought that an even smaller percentage of people who think they need to get ever richer and control ever more aspects of ever more people's lives are basically ruining our offline world.
The main issue is that testing if someone knows and has the skills to do a job well (or at all) is a hard problem, whether you outsource that to people who write a piece of paper or try to do it in-house in the employing company. Hell, half the companies do not know if the employees they have had for years are any good at their job.
Actually complex distributed software projects (like online games where massive player bases all interact directly) have a better reason than most of the things you named to force updates to new versions, maintaining every interaction of every version with every other version would be a combinatorial explosion that is just not manageable, the complex interactions that occur when everyone is using the latest version barely are.
I wish fewer people would "appreciate" micro-blogging and short videos in general. It has too much of an influence on public discourse and the short posts aren't really suitable for the complex issues we face today.
Pretty much all their other projects are not really worth it, e.g. that mobile OS, Firefox Send, their VPN, all those AI projects recently, Pocket,... and usually just lead to dead ends. Thunderbird might be an exception if I needed an email client but I do not.
And the ones that do seem useful and good bang for the buck, like Mozilla Observatory, get abandoned.
Pretty sure that doesn't even cover the "just above the average wage" earner in most western countries though I suppose it depends a bit on if you count the parts that directly go to the government without even counting as gross wages (employer parts of social security, health care,...).
Oh, I thought you had some specific project in mind.
I wonder if it is like character creation in an RPG, 5 minutes to elect a new pope and then the rest of the time is time they need to think of a name.