But the whole matter could have been avoided if you were solving a problem you actually cared about. Then there would have been no doubt if you should or should not invest another year of your time.
If I'm solving a problem I personally care about, then I will also be personally willing to put in vastly more effort into learning and getting up to speed with the solution than the vast majority of my target customers will.
As the OP said, you need something that will give relatively quick return on investment of effort. If it's going to require a larger up-front investment, then you have to really, really care about the improvement it's providing in order to put in that effort.
I have innumerable half-baked solutions to various problems I care about, and by "half-baked" I mean they only work in specific situations and require massaging the inputs into a form that the solutions will accept. And that's fine for me; after all, I cared enough to implement the fancy solution in the first place. But I don't expect anyone else to use it unless I clean it up and package it nicely.
Very nice concept! We use something similar for daily follow-ups, it's a bot that integrates with Slack and pings us on a daily basis to check what we did yesterday, what we are up to today and if we are having any problems. Pretty simple yet powerful: https://dailybot.co/
I actually found this post really good. The buzzfeed-esque jokes are made this way with the only purpose of helping raise awareness about online security and how anyone with a minimum knowledge of the Internet can easily breach into your accs.
But the whole matter could have been avoided if you were solving a problem you actually cared about. Then there would have been no doubt if you should or should not invest another year of your time.