In the "How I Built This" podcast for Instagram, Kevin Systrom specifically says the filters were created to take the relatively low-quality photos early smartphone cameras were capable of and making them look like photographer-quality photos. Filters were about taking average photos and making them "pop" but not necessarily by virtue of having deep domain knowledge of color.

I was never under this impression. I was always under the impression the filters are just created by a designer playing around with various effects until it looked nice.

Because it isn't complicated or novel to make compressed 8-bit jpegs have color filters. There are tools for the job and they've been around for a long time.

Working in a different color space than standard requires a little bit of familiarity and finesse that modifying 8-bit jpegs for consumption on the internet did not require.

Many photographers and printers are familiar with this dilemma in a variety of circumstances, where the cameras create images in a different color space and higher bit depth that can't be perceived at all with any technology or the human eye.

I'm sure the comment you're replying to wasn't thinking of the algorithm that applies a filter to a jpeg, but the process by which that filter is created in the first place. The assumption being that there's some sort of theory to colour that allows you to systematically improve the aesthetic qualities of images.

As an analogy, think of the value music theory (i. e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_(music)#Harmonic_content) for composition.

The creative process isn't novel. There isn't even the capability of any layer masking in most mobile apps, including Instagram, compared to pre-existing more robust tools on desktop (and other mobile apps), severely limiting the 'technical interestingness' to begin with.

Instagram value proposition is that other mostly young people use it.

Instagram's value prop was, and is, mobile.