It isn't your implicit value judgment that is wrong. It is your assumption that "The truth is that it's not that hard to get into commercialization of more complex technology if you're willing to invest time and energy into getting the background."

Anything that needs to be "commercialized" and is not a basic science discovery is immediately deeply dubious.

Something that you think is valuable simply because it is more "complex" is even more deeply dubious.

And finally the idea that "getting the background" of complex problems is simply a matter of "time and energy" is downright deluded. It's not a brute force thing. It's an insight and thoughtfulness thing.

Something that is "complex" and was built in a "non-commercial" form to solve a problem that requires a lot of non-obvious "background" is likely to be some sort of gothic, baroque monstrosity that does not deserve to be "commercialized." It is even less deserving of absorbing the time and talents of smart people than the little "useless" apps you are complaining about.

In computer science, the equivalent of basic science discoveries is fundamental algorithmic discoveries (finding a P algorithm for an important problem that was thought to be NP for instance), new ideas in encryption and security and so forth. That sort of stuff is rare, and when something like that is discovered, nobody wastes time. A gold rush is sparked to commercialize it.

The stuff it sounds like you are talking about isn't this. It is the tons of bloated junkware that sits in shelves in universities and research labs under the pretentious label of "research prototype software." Much of it is of no use and deserves to stay there. It contains no basic algorithmic advances, and very little practical problem-solving insight.

Or you're talking about "real problems" like poverty, healthcare etc. Here, the problem isn't software at all, usually. The innovations needed are in other areas. Software is just a piece of a larger puzzle. There is no reason to expect the software people to take the lead in solving them. Every major and complex problem today is partly a software problem, but that does not mean it is wholly or even dominantly a software problem.

On the other hand, you are seriously underestimating the value of "yet another mobile photo sharing app." That may be the first use to which a certain technology is put, but the fact that it finds a foothold is what opens the door to a lot more opportunity in potentially unrelated areas.

Sure, there's a lot of small-minded vanity stuff out there, built by small-minded people who simply cannot think outside the tech tech bubble and the needs in their own lives, and who don't think in terms of footholds and options within larger opportunity spaces.

But there isn't much opportunity cost in them doing that instead of working on "commercialization" of more complex stuff or "important" problems. If they can't see the larger opportunities in apparently useless things, they lack the vision to do valuable things in those other paths as well.

Arguably these doomed losers will learn more valuable lessons by failing to build a photo-sharing app than by failing to commercialize a monstrous baroque solution to an ill-framed problem.