Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply and I may come back and comment again as I digest it. I struggled with the same things in film school, I almost dropped out because I was frustrated at the the level of what I considered, very many different names... "unfair", "cheating", "plagiarism", I used to get very worked up about it. "They used full auto here I can tell" - "Those vectors are downloaded" - "That filter is a preset they bought" - especially so when I came second. Our dean would regularly say the most creative people simply do the best job of hiding their source of creativity.

I agree with you code and art are not the same thing, but I do suspect it can get a bit complicated, it still is for me. Even on your question about how I feel - I don't have a good answer for you because I won technical Emmy awards for working on abstractions, lots of people said our work was cheap and gimmicy, cool, we won Emmy's. I go back and forth often on what is "fair" (whatever that means).

Of all you said the last paragraph I can connect with the most, I tried to have someone thrown out of film school for the same type of thing, but as that same dean told me "life is too short man, you gotta chill out".