I am one of those people who starts projects and never finishes them. Sometimes I will spend days upon days on something, just to decide that I’m not quite happy with it.
Which means that I’ve got lots of half finished orphan projects on my computer. Some of them were surely just a waste of time. But it’s always possible that some of them might one day prove useful.
Every once in a while I’ll see a presentation of cool work by somebody else that somehow reminds me of one of my sad little orphans. Then I will dig up that project and look at it again.
And every once in a while when that happens, I’ll get inspired and actually finish one of those things and release it to the world. And then it is an orphan no more.