HR is the bane of progress. HR is there for only one purpose, to keep the company from receiving lawsuits. It does not matter if the person they hire is competent, convivial, corrigible, or even capable of just showing up. They only pay attention to whether it follows their departments' regulated practices.
In hiring, HR is called upon to select someone, from a pool of sometimes thousands of candidates, based first on their resume/CV, a document broadly expected to be full of lies and exaggeration, (which increases likelihood of hiring someone dishonest) and which can have no visible indications of what the applicant can actually do, then based on an/a series of interviews, a practice which only tests the candidate's ability to bullshit/be charming for short formalized conversations. (increasing likelihood of selecting for neurotypicality or unreasoning confidence) No HR person knows enough about essentially anything else anyone does to actually be able to tell the difference between a beam collimator and a retroencabulator, and staffing agencies make it even less likely because they are even further from the work.
I absolutely LOVED Mirror's Edge. That feeling of hitting flow in game and out of game as you just move smoothly from point to point was just amazing. I played originally on PS2PS3 and almost got the plat trophy. I loved trying not only to find the fastest path but the smoothest, the weirdest, the pacifist, etc. It was great.
Then I tried 2 for like 5 seconds before I dropped it. It immediately felt like a betrayal of the first game. I hated the UI. I hated the color grade. I hated the style. I hated what seemed like a turn toward the violent.
It would yield another religion, originated in a group that could parley their forced participation into fame on social media, which might lead to many more followers and eventually a holy war with the Mormons. Hmm. Might be worth a try.
Been in that state a lot. That's classic depression. Evo-psych has some stupid ideas but their read on depression is solid. That urge to withdraw from society is a human urge. The urge is designed to lead to either, you leaving your band of primates to seek another, or your fellow group members coming and finding you to show how much you matter to them. Modern life doesn't let that happen though. So many of our relationships are digital or just shallow so no one can tell you're leaving, and changing your group in a real way is hard. If you want to feel betterment you have to use your rational brain to seek out what your body is instinctively reaching for. Pick something that you have always cared about, and go to a real life event centered on that thing. This can be almost anything, as long as there are real people, really sharing a physical space. Talk to the people about that thing. Don't do it just to tick it off the list, you have to pay attention to what they are saying because you need to be able to articulate their ideas and then respond to them.
It's technically true in absolutes. Absolute freedom, without giving up humanity, gives no guarantee of safety provided by anything outside of yourself. Absolute safety exists only in a providential void, where needs are seen to magically, as by a benevolent god. If you seek safety in the absolute freedom, you lose the freedom in one way or another. Walls to keep out enemies keep the builders in. Tools to provide for survival require production and maintenance, taking away your freedom to choose to do things that you enjoy. If you seek freedom in the absolute safety, you have to risk giving external forces access. Those forces always carry risk of harm, whether by malicious action or indifference.
However, while it's necessary to sacrifice one for the other in the absolute, it's not sufficient. Nothing about the relationship says being less of one necessarily makes you more of the other. The easy example is prison. In most prisons your freedom is severely curtailed, but you certainly aren't safe. You might even be imprisoned for the purpose of being harmed.
For one, designing NPCs, encounters, etc. is worldbuilding. You wouldn't say a painter had stopped painting because they switched from a 3" brush to a 000. This part is just a semantic misunderstanding.
It's not really a matter of good or bad. I'm not saying 'good DMs worldbuild and bad DMs steal others' creations.' I'm saying 'Why buy an expensive kit just to make a dorodango?'
You can clearly recognise how much work it is to play/run a TTRPG. (scheduling, planning, worldbuilding, session prep level worldbuilding, player counseling and conflict resolution, game mechanism/in-world effect translation in both directions, mechanical balancing, other things I'm not thinking of just now) The whole point of doing all that work is that it grants freedom.
'Worth' is absolutely a subjective concept but I say it's pretty silly to do all the work it takes to play, only to play something locked into preconceived notions, and especially notions that are designed to be lowest-common-denominator to the general population by someone who isn't even at the table. You can disagree if you like, of course, but it's not a matter of right/wrong.
Succinctly, I would say any GM who says 'I don't want to spend my time thinking about the in-game world' is just someone who would be happier as a player but is taking one for the team. In the metaphor, he's the guy at the orgy squeezing a fleshlight between his thighs and wearing a wig so his buddies can pretend. He's trying to be creative with what's lying around. However, everyone would be happier if he wasn't in that position. They're all just too desperate to go elsewhere. I mean, it's really nice of the guy to do that for his friends, but it's not really what they showed up for.
I'm all for not wasting the resources involved in dishes but cold canned soup is kind of nasty. I'd at least warm it up if that's an option.