Great write up, @Benudek. Thank you for sharing your story and insights.
May I just suggest that the intention behind inviting the stories is not to motivate anybody. We are not a corporation that needs to motivate its employees. I believe people who come to this thread are already motivated to give back after receiving so much. They just don’t know how and/or are uncertain that they can. Therefore, I feel, the problem is not a lack of motivation, but a need to demonstrate that the contributing can be done on different levels and by users with a very wide range of skills and experience, leading to wide range of contributions from submitting a broken link or a typo fix to a complicated algorithm PRs, overall all being equably important, because it’s the whole that makes a great product and not just its parts.
And to clarify, I’m not asking you to edit your story, just wanting to make a stress on why we are inviting users to share these stories.