Are you, by any chance, some kind of sociology grad?

Not yet. ;-)   - It looks also unlikely at the moment that my life will evolve
in such direction.

You can't study development purely on the process level,

I find that I am not studying this topic. Am I practically contributing
small improvements to free software (including Linux) for years?

ignoring the actual usefulness of contributions

I guess their usefulness is varying over time.

and the fact that there are objective criteria of their worth.

Are there any source code quality goals left over which would be nice
to achieve also for this software module?

Regards,
Markus