and instead consider: it took 15 years for tools to be robust enough for a small team to do what large ones were doing
this is absolutely true
sometimes those tools are the table scraps AAA tosses to us when they're no longer profitable as a secret sauce -- open-sourcing or publicly selling licenses to internal engines, describing internal processes in interviews, and the like
sometimes it's the gradual pace of improvements in the space of independently-made tools (and the rest of the computer world in general)