I had no interest in cars mechanically growing up. I still don't really. But when the repair shop told me they couldn't replace my alternator for two weeks, I went to the parts store, put on the YouTube video for the replacement of that specific part on my specific van year range, rolled up my sleeves and got to work. It easily took me twice as long as someone with any amount of experience doing the same job, and I ran into challenges like having to pry the radiator far enough out of the way without damaging it to give enough room to wiggle the alternator out. Having to zip tie a long stick onto a wrench to extend the reach to get one particularly obnoxious bolt out.

I've also replaced the starter and replaced the default head unit with something modern that includes GPS. Most of it was intimidating to get started, but none of it was what I would call difficult. There's too many very specific guides around showing you exactly what you need to do. And developers are used to following guides and running into inconsistent documentation and troubleshooting from there. Most of them would be right at home stumbling their way through auto repair.

Last year I epoxied my garage floor and got very good results thanks to my YouTube studies. My YouTube internship has also lead to me re-modelling my entire kitchen. I designed everything in sketchup and am in the middle of building the custom cabinets. I'll end up mixing and pouring concrete countertops myself as well. I've repaired my dishwasher twice and my dryer three times by looking up symptoms online and ordering the most likely parts and just digging in. Every time there have been videos with the specific model and the specific problem that I can follow along with.

Again, none of this is what I would consider to be difficult relative to some of the technical problems I've had to face at work. It's all very well documented processes and combined with the ability to troubleshoot and the budget to not have to fight your tools all the time and most things seem to be very achievable by non-experts. I still don't consider myself to be "handy". But I know I can fix pretty much anything in my house or on my vehicle with enough tutorials and time.

This seems like the real answer here... you have to actually try, and not make excuses why it's impossible to even try. Lots of somewhat abrasive replies say you need a ton of money, time, and space that most people don't have to do hobbies- but those are easy excuses, and are simply not true.

Having the right tools can make the experiences far, far better. But it's often not a requirement. I can imagine the prospect of cutting dozens of rabbets by hand using a rabbet plane might keep some people away. If they had the space and money for a router table or table saw setup to cut dados they might stick with it and create more things. It's the same with programming. There are tons of developers who learned when there weren't good tools or documentation and became deep experts. As the tools got easier and easier to learn, the bar for who could participate dropped as well. So we have a lot of productive developers today who couldn't have really participated in "old school" software development at all. Ultimately I agree with you though. A willingness to try is 80% of the challenge it seems.