Yes I meant that. Not a really nice community. Won't call them noobs, but yes they are thick. The first impression that I got when I saw that section was that most people didn't really know what ROM hacking was about or what they were actually doing. All they knew was which tool to use to do what.
I don't check those forums often though, I could be wrong.
The GD section here seemed worse. Very few projects actually tried to do something new.
Mostly, I spent some time trying to understand 3D stuff. I learned some OpenGL, tried DirectX and XNA. The first game I tried to write was an FPS, you can imagine the failure of writing an FPS in a custom made engine by a single indie-dev. Then I started a 2D RPG. That went well, I worked on it for sometime. Eventually I stopped that.
After that, I've just created small demos while learning new things.