“I took a step back and immediately saw absolutely no redeeming value of what I had just done, and this made me feel incredibly sad.”
I would rephrase that as, “…absolutely no redeeming value “at this time”…”
You have just planted seeds. Of course you can see no “redeeming value” right now. If you just planted seeds in your garden out back, you wouldn’t see any results there either, “today”.
But just as the seeds in your garden will deliver results in a few months (provided you care for them), the seeds you just planted in your little “hairbrained” project, will also reap dividends. You just don’t know when or what.
Sometime in the future when you least expect it, the lightbulb will go on and you’ll figure out a cool solution to some other problem. What you don’t know now (and probably won’t even realize then) was that what you did today stirred a few neurons to enable that light bulb to go on in the future.
As hackers, “everything” we do is either planting seeds or reaping harvest. If you didn’t see a harvest today, that’s because you were planting seeds. Just keep on working and trust the process; that’s how we all get better at what we do.