The info I have gives me good confidence in the belief that studying PCT won't help me with procrastination (as I mentioned, it was out there for a lot of time without drastically visible applications of this sort, plus I skimmed some highly-cited papers via google scholar, but I can't be confident in what I read because I didn't grasp the outline of the field given how little I looked). The things I study and think about these days are good math, tools for better understanding of artificial intelligence. Not terribly good chances for making useful progress, but not woo either (unlike, say, a year ago, much worse two years ago).