Gear Doesn't Matter (aka. this is all for ME, not for YOU)

Cameras, microphones, lights, lenses. Fast-paced editing, graphics packages, music beds, frame rates. Better sets, creative angles, structured storytelling and optimized packaging.
These are all things a video creator, such as myself, will inevitably indulge in, over-spend on, hype up, learn and utilize to produce better and better videos - assuming they stick with this hobby, art form, or career path.

But… better for whom, exactly?

An artist or creative of any kind inherently wants to produce their best work. We want to be proud of the end result, we want it to make you feel something, we want to impress someone, to make us the most money or get the biggest response, or to convey our ideas most effectively. Releasing an unfinished work in progress or a work that doesn’t feel like it meets the bar of “good enough” can be difficult. It can be embarrassing both from a technical level and the possible vulnerability revealed within not being tied up in a neat enough package. It can feel like a missed opportunity, as most audiences are much less likely to be interested in a second or final draft of a given piece.
But the audience also doesn’t care about any individual measure of quality within the work in the first place.
The very act of “making a video better” seems to be almost exclusively an act for the creator themself rather than for the viewer. The viewer just wants to learn, feel, laugh, whatever the goal is, while the creator wants to make art.
The viewer has no investment in the artistic quality or value of a video, nor the technical expertise of it. The viewer doesn’t care about the camera or the lens or the microphone or color grading or any of that. The creator does.
The gear, the skill improvements and so on can unlock many possibilities for how the creator makes their videos, but at the end of the day the viewer simply does not care; the would-be viewer doesn’t have a higher chance of clicking on the video; the algorithm is not any more likely to serve it to a would-be viewer.

This is all super obvious in its own way, and most of us (myself included) have known this since basically day one. Which for me, was a long, long time ago. Yet, as obvious as it may be, isn’t as obvious as it seems. There’s still this kind of unspoken assumption that your efforts will be rewarded.
They’re not. At all.

I could sell all of my camera gear and go back to filming on my very first miniDV camcorder or my Canon T3i and get mostly the same results in terms of viewership and revenue. Some technically-aware members of the audience might raise an eyebrow, but otherwise things would continue as usual.
Even separate from gear, it doesn’t matter if I record a game in HD or 4K, 30FPS or 60FPS, if I edit fast or slow or use lower-thirds or transitions, or if I just show game trailer footage instead of captures I did myself.

Sometimes, that idea feels very freeing. In fact, I’ve been making videos just like this over on my Final Draft YouTube channel as an experiment to go back to this style. It’s old school, it’s raw and less stressful. There’s a lot of benefits to doing it.
But at the same time, it doesn’t feel as good to make these. If I have something I really just want to sit down and have a conversation about - a video like this is great. But otherwise, I don’t feel proud of it, I wasn’t challenged by it, and it wasn’t creatively rewarding - thus I’m not very encouraged to do that.

Where does that reward come from, then?

All of those additional elements to make a video “better” come from intrinsic rewards. It comes from that challenge of doing something new or improving, the creative expression through artistic decisions, and feeling like I’m achieving a vision in my mind. It’s all in service of making the video better to me because I want the video to be better - not because the viewer wants it to be better or even feels that it’s better.
And if I’m not happy with the outcome of the video, with the fruits of my labor, then that problem lies for me. That’s on me, because all of that effort was for me. And if I’m not enjoying the result of that effort, why am I doing it?