I have a very good Ham buddy who spent big bucks activating Navassa back in the 1980s and his call sign is still very visible on the light house.
Good for your friend.
But, as you go on to say, there are
endless adventures available, some hard, some easy, and none of which requires a radio. When someone activates Everest for SOTA, I wanna hear about it. Nobody will ever activate Everest for DXCC.
There are plenty of islands, mostly unnamed as far as I can tell, in the same waters as Bovet or Peter I that
nobody activates. You can find them easily on Google Earth.
If it was all about the thrill of the chase, why aren't people raising 750K to activate those? Or ones with easy landings that cost far less that are still very strenuous?
The answer is obvious: The apex of the thrill
for most of these guys is doing it
for us. Sure, they get to bask in the glory of it, but
we set the list of radio adventures. They just figure out how to do it.
I also listen to what Martti Lane has to say about what he calls "the show". He seems to view himself in the entertainment business, at least to a degree, and he certainly talks about "the audience".
The Microlite crowd was closer to your friend's idea. The goal was to get there, put up a minimalist station, and work the hardy few who were smart enough and whose stations were good enough to get them. They didn't even advertise ahead of time. They didn't really cater to an "audience".
Which expeditions do we see in 2023? The Microlites died out ages ago. What we see are the ones modelled after Martti Lane's concepts, at least for big time, rare enough DXCCs.
How many expeditions talk endlessly about handing out ATNOs as an objective? Band plans. Plans to work which ever of NA, EU, and JA are farthest from them?
I've also had the pleasure of talking to these guys now and then at Visalia, one on one. And, hearing their presentations.
Sure, they'll tell all the wonderful stories your friend did. But it is also clear that they went because there was
demand. From
us. That is to say
we set the terms of the adventure suite.
They do not do things to ramp up the difficulty or activate places we don't care for. It's hard enough already. They are , in fact, looking for things that make their expensive and difficult job easier. Remember, F&H for FT8 did not exist
except for the fact that big time DXpeditioners figured out how to do it, lobbied for it, and got it written.. Joe Taylor and his team had no clue about anything like that. They are mostly VHFers with limited interest in HF DXing. Fortunately for us all, they signed on. But it wasn't their idea. It was done to make the already hard job of big time DXpeditioning
easier.
If it was just "glory" alone, they'd all be packing it in for places like Baker and Deschero. Most always did, but all of them would if you were right. There's a lot of non-glory pain associated with activating them now. Plenty of tough places in the world that lack the hassle. IOTA beckons. See what the Russian Robinson group does on nearly no budget. It's damn impressive. But they are much closer to your friends' ideas than the DXpeditioners I read or have met. And, a lot of IOTAs have no serious restrictions. Just difficulties getting there. And even they go with an
objective that was set by their audience.
Try and pretend it has nothing to do with us, and then look at the evidence. It's a big world. Someone else out there is like your friend. But, most of them seem not to be that way. They will tell
just as many stories about the ugly horror show of what it takes to activate a place as they do about the thrill of being there. Because, at the highest levels, that's what the game is. The actual trip is often the easy bit.
Their adventures are intimately tied up with the DXCC program and its rules. There's no serious argument around it.