The fun comes from the 4 or 5 friends yelling over it, exactly, because that movie alone is just boring bad.

Is it really simpler though, or did you just stop looking? I only ask because bolting a shelf under the top and tying cables to it is still a change you made, just a cheap one. The thing that actually changed in January was your head, not the desk. You stopped comparing your setup to pictures online, and that is what made it feel fine. I went through the same thing with my garage bench and the fix was never the bench, it was me quitting the browsing. The twelve dollar shelf just happened to be there when you finally let it go, and honestly that is the real story here.

Stop overthinking it, the dumb pizza box one just felt more real than your fancy Photoshop cutouts.