Does it have to be a single shot? I feel like there is a lot to be found there using focus stacking, matching scale and putting an emphasis on the contrasts you can find around the city, like a small patch of moss on top of a wall taking half the frame and a busy part of the city the other. A broken glass bottle taking half the frame and a hypermodern building the other. Finding places where many different or even opposite things meet - large and small, nature and urban, broken/forgotten and new/imposing, fast and slow, and then bringing them together in a way that removes the conceptual border between them - i.e. creating a point of intersection where it’s not obvious that there is one to be found.

with nothing in it for them.

They don’t get nothing, they get additional competition for already scarce work.

You don’t need photography skills for “good enough” and not everything needs to be better than that, this included.

I’m pretty good at converting information I gather into actuality. Prior knowledge doesn’t obsoletize experience, but it’s valuable to guide you how that experience should be gathered, and it may just prevent you from internalizing bad form. In a sports context, unsupervised training can be quite damaging, especially in the beginning. It’s easy to pick something up the wrong way, but it’s very difficult to unlearn that in favor of propriety after the damage is done.

I get your point, though, of course. You want to prevent people from running into conformity, preventing themselves from experiencing and finding their own uniqueness, and I agree with that. But I do think that you can have both, and I actually think that learning from others will get you there faster, if you’re careful not to outsource any thinking and creative work.

So, I agree with you calling for caution.