Okay, I was generalising from experience; most students I've met lack intrinsic motivation. School systems typically encourage students to depend on extrinsic motivation.
Tutors should be able to approximate the ZPD better than any student can. Most students lack intrinsic motivation and it's a tutor's job to help them get started.
Not being as happy and being unhappy are not the same.
Regardless, you should read Robert Putnam's essay, E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century (2007). He makes it clear that social trust goes down because of it.
I'm saying that younger generations don't seem to care about realism as much as they care about having fun creating and sharing things with their friends. A large proportion of younger gamers play Roblox and Minecraft. Will they grow up and start playing more GPU-heavy games, or will they continue to play where their friends are?
Being free is exactly what has made those platforms as well as mobile games so popular. Are they going to start paying for subscriptions?
It's like learning to read English after speaking fluently for a few years. You may only need the letter sounds and then you can guess the rest. Learning Chinese works that way. You learn some basic characters and then you can guess the rest. (Learning to write without a computer is definitely more of a challenge though.)
I don't necessarily disagree, but researchers are not required to be good communicators. An academic can lead their field and be a terrible lecturer. A specialist can let a generalist help explain concepts for them.
They should still review the final result though. There is no excuse for not doing that.