Ham radio was the smart phone back in the day. The old timers who had horses not cars as kids, probably said why don't you talk in person instead of on that stupid box. Be a man.
Now you are telling kids in 2021 that they have to take a test to use antique technology and pay thousands of dollars in equipment costs to get on the air to talk to who? Have you been on HF phone lately.
These kids don't need ham radio they need to engineer something new. Like a new and better smart phone or computer or whatever.
You seem to live on Fantasy Island. Ham radio never was a smartphone. Ham radio was, and is, where the operator needs to know a little bit about electricity, RF engineering, how to listen in a noisy audio environment, operating procedures, frequency allocations, etc. Smartphones are mass market consumer devices which require no interest in, or understanding of, the topics above.
I don't subscribe to the utility of an uninformed, sexist and ageist view of history. Lots of people still use horses, especially where there isn't a freeway or even a dirt road for 50 miles. You can't climb a
12,000 ft. peak in your SUV. There are also lots of people who ride horses simply for pleasure, or competition. You seem never to have spent a day at the track. Horse people are men and women.
You must be what they call a "dude."
I'm not telling "kids" anything. I'm saying that ham radio is a scientific/engineering/historical hobby that attracts a certain, quite limited, group of people. They tend not to be "in with the in-crowd." The kids I started in ham radio with became physicians, heads of state bureaucracies, successful business persons. Not stupid; not tied to what's trendy.
Lots of us don't buy all our gear. We buy some, build some, modify most. Your smartphone operator only has to put out a few hundred dollars once a year to get the latest and greatest model. After being told to do so by the smartphone itself. That's a very smart phone, and profitable for someone who already has lots of dough.
I avoid HF "phone." CW is more poetic, musical, creative. CW ops are, in my experience, interesting folks.
Conspicuous consumer culture kids don't engineer anything. They consume expensive products which are designed to be addictive.
This reminds me of the tale of a guy named Albert who was a founder of many of our contemporary concepts of physics and cosmology. Started the "spacetime" ball rollling. He didn't use a smartphone, or a telephone or a spark gap radio. He thought about things and came up with new ways of seeing the world via what was in his head. No shiny contraptions needed.