>In the unlikely case I end up working a day-job for the rest of my life
Statistically, that's an incorrect statement despite the best wishes of all present.
You also failed to present anything remotely resembling a sane value equation. The only product of yours that the mass market would've been interested in, you managed to crash and burn.
You're not exactly offering anything in return for the money at the moment, and you don't have that large of an audience either.
Not even Joel would have had the gall to try something like this.
We don't do a lot of flashy animations or anything like that at my place of employment, so generally it's a, "get it working, get it working reliably" priority order.
Server-side js is something I'd like to do more of, but I rarely have an excuse to whip it out, at home or work. I'm in the process of learning rails with an old friend at home, simply for a change of pace.
I continue to get better, and I'm almost to the 4 year mark. I've improved more in the last year than I did in my second year. (First year programming professionally remains the largest leap, although perhaps the least significant.)
As to how I become better, I am an obsessive generalist. I don't like not understanding the stack that makes my projects tick. I don't get into wasteful/unproductive levels of implementation detail, but I do my best to grok the things I'm working with.
(I'm capable of patching django core for custom purposes if I need to, for example.)
I was pretty clueless on CSS until recently. Now I'm very slightly better than clueless. (I have a better grasp of display and position now, for example.)
I continue to use tables where they're (probably) inappropriate but for my users, it doesn't matter. Too many IE users and not enough mobile users to really care.
I just keep learning unfamiliar things and re-integrating what I learn into my daily grind. Everything I've ever learned about computers and programming and front-web web dev makes me a better Python programmer.
I just don't care anymore.