I was quite addicted to poker (no-limit hold 'em) for a couple of years (2005-2008) until it became hard to play online in the US. Now I just play with play money on some mobile app every few months :) It's not true that when people play badly they always lose money. It took me a while to realize that my compass of how well I was playing had to come from within. Otherwise the worst thing that could happen to me was to play badly and win a hand. I'd then be giving away money for a long time, going on tilt, etc. But yeah you're right that in the long run the better player wins, particularly in cash games. Tournaments seem like more of a lottery (maybe I'm just not very good).
I'm constantly looking for people to hack with as well. Some ideas:
a) We could work on anarki. For example, try out the latest version sometime when you have time and let me know if mktemp broke again on Windows. Help kinnard and me expand the install instructions for Anarki to Windows. Neither of us knows how to run Arc there, so this would be very valuable. These small-ish ideas might be the start of a larger project.