As someone who has also been considerably lucky to 'right place, right time' my way through life, I wouldn't consider our experiences to be the rule, rather the exception.
Considering the countless other people who also dropped out and did bupkis to pioneer any fields makes your comparison even more exceedingly terrible.

And both equally qualfied to show their ignorance to the world at large, which they are both doing quite nicely.

NSF funding is down 56% for grants next year, and NIH is down 40%. And if you use Hegseth's example of research that is 'wasteful', I guess you really are far down the rabbit hole. NSF's total funding is down *72%*. It's bad. Really bad.

Beware Project Majestic! Beware the Program!

This is why the new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certifications seem to be developed and starting to slowly roll out, to start putting some teeth behind this stuff and prevent the self-certification issues that have plagued a couple of schools now (Penn State is the other I think).

Of course, the new CMMC appears to be a boondoggle by the people who set it up, but why let a good crisis go to waste...I guess?

And Dell has always been good to us with warranty returns. I just plug in their Diagnostic Disk and run the Diagnostic. When the error code pops up, I call them and tell them what the error code is, and they ship us a new part. If I can't boot to the disk, I read them the light codes on the back or front of the machine. Before the era of Diagnostic Disks, we had a couple of problems here and there, but lately, Dell has been absolutely fantastic. I can't say any bad things about their warranty repair service with respect to Linux.

It might help that I work at one of the biggest universities in the country, but I really don't know.