They buy ... but doesn't make them happy or improve their lives.

Bingo. I live nicely on less than 2K a month. This includes purchasing a band saw, drill press, planer and misc hand tools and materials for my current project.

All you need is the ability to ignore the "Oooh, lookee! Gotta have!" impulse.

Why not offer free,...

Because there's no such thing?

You mean "provide tax payer funded".

And they make about half as much.

Yeah, no. If you can reliably decipher the customer wants and needs, display it back to them in a form they can understand and equally reliably show them better ways of approaching their needs, you'll do very well. Did that for decades and made very good money. Typically more than their programming staff.

You do understand that parodies are gross exaggerations and "the dude" is no more real than the "I can code up a sophisticated, never before done interface in an afternoon" programmer.

Oh, I forgot - "with no errors".