I have an order of magnitude more playtime than you (though most of it modded to be fair), and I still play it regularly. It is absolutely not true that people good at it don’t understand the mechanics.
What is true though is that it’s an objectively bad game. Or at the very least is supremely frustrating. It’s “unplayable” in single player because the AI is braindead and that plus the actual mechanics will just hinder your fun, and it’s unplayable in multiplayer because it’s slow as fuck (plus you need like, friends or something). Plus past the early game the game becomes a huge slog, with infinitely wide countries spread across multiple continents with effectively infinite money just hiring all mercs.
The only way to win wars is often total or near total occupation of the enemy. I could go on for a long time explaining all the ways in which it’s a bad game. I guess I play it mostly because of familiarity than fun.
I agree with the premise, but this website makes me feel very stupid / unskilled. 2 months for a basic x86 kernel with keyboard and mouse drivers, elf loading etc? I don’t think 2 months would be enough for me to even partially complete one of the subtasks. Unless this is 2 months of 8-hour 5-day weeks but, no, even then I doubt I could do it.