In my experience, more than 10 years, that is wishful thinking.
The people who code 24/7 on personal or open source things love doing this to a point of near obsession and I know of some who have been living that way for more than 15 years (yeah, meet them when we were teenagers and they lived glued to computer science books) and at that point you just have to accept that you will never be nearly as good as them and then be glad to be able to learn from them.
I'm a web developer specialized in coding modular sites and passionate about writing maintainable code.
I do frontend, web apps and I organise communities.
In my experience, more than 10 years, that is wishful thinking.
The people who code 24/7 on personal or open source things love doing this to a point of near obsession and I know of some who have been living that way for more than 15 years (yeah, meet them when we were teenagers and they lived glued to computer science books) and at that point you just have to accept that you will never be nearly as good as them and then be glad to be able to learn from them.
Yeah you're probably right :)