How honest you want 'em? 🙂
The Custom Controls I can't speak to how much interest there would be. I regularly work with SSIS and third party tools are usually heavily quality controlled so we don't touch them, and designing my own would be painful and overkill under most circumstances. I can't see ever having much of an interest in doing that unless I was a company specializing in third party tools. I could certainly see enough people that do care at PASS though.
Optimizations are always good, but you'd end up competing with the majority of folks who know optimization and are trying to do their own, with PASS being a great place to attract other well known names. Not sure, honestly, but how many people do you expect to attend PASS that don't know how to remove cursors for speed?
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
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