What is interesting however is the thought that developer, documentation and test contributions to open source are unpaid, but security contributions are paid for. Possibly this reflects a lesson of the past 30 years that pretty much nobody in the world is capable of shipping fully secure software for general purpose computers.

dotNet Core is still in dev and no version of Windows yet ships with it. So no zero-dayness is possible. .Net Framework versions up to 4.6 are the current live versions

I have worked with software architects who might fit your description but for a big system to succeed someone competent still has to do the architecture. Kruchten for instance notes an example of a big agile project that fell over its lack of architecture. Coplien Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development is nearer the mark. He is, after all, an expert programmer as well as a software architect.

By way of contra-evidence, if following Jesus is a religion, I note 3 books by people who say they did so as a result of originally setting out to prove it was wrong.
* Lee Strobel, The Case the for Christ, 1998
* Albert Henry Ross (pseudonym Frank Morison), Who Moved the Stone, 1930
* Josh McDowell, More than a carpenter, 1977

Games programming. Seems to get and retain a good level of interest -- look how much stickability http://scratch.mit.edu/ has got. Of course, it's a whole new ballgame and a learning curve for you too if your background is enterprise Java.