Yes, the metaproblem is: it has to make money. It turns out that "doing genuinely useful things for end users" almost never makes money. I found this out long ago when I had the experience that booking air travel for optimized cost/convenience was a total pain. I figured software can solve this, so built a ticket search engine that supported the query semantics a human typically wants. Dumb idea because you can't get the data over which to search except from airlines, and airlines know that making it convenient to find low convenient fares makes them less money. So they won't give you the data. In fact the entire problem "finding cheap convenient air fare" is actually there in support of someone else's (the airlines) business model.