Sorry, I’m not a professional philosopher but did study it at university and still retain an interest in it. I was interested to read this statement. “Many philosophers have been infected (often by later Wittgenstein) with the idea that philosophy is supposed to be useless.”.
I take that to mean you consider Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to be his better work. I do too and have been mocked for saying so when I was a student. I was taught by some very famous professors at a well placed university but I wasn’t much of a student, not the brightest crayon in that years box.
I agree, the professional philosophers look back at some fairly ancient text, but there is a reason for that. If you are building a car that is aiming to be better than everything else on the road you dont start blindly, you look at other cars and check their faults and build something that does not have the same faults. The aim of philosophy is not a combative sport. Its true aim is to build upon knowledge, but what knowledge is also becomes a philosophical debate. I prefer meta-philosophy and scientific method, I prefer igtheism to atheism and prefer Hume to Descartes. The old dead guys determine, in part how I think of the alive new guys. The old guys gave me a set of tools to dissect the work of the new guys.
It seems to me you are talking about levels of entropy. High entropy systems still rely upon the low entropy of universal laws. A computer program routines may be itertwined, wrapped around each other, undocumented, may be a nightmare to understand, but if it works, why fix it? It conforms to the requirements to compile it into a useable executable file. A star that is exploding is like a spaghetti structure. It falls into a state of high entropy but only in as much as universal laws dictate how it will do that. Correct me if I am wrong but are you talking about levels of entropy?
Edited in later:
The kind of entropy I am talking about is a physical state. Imagine you make a building of bricks with a nice kitchen, dining room, etc etc. The building is left to stand for a 1000 years. At first it has low entropy. It is a very definite structure. Over time, roof tiles fall off, the rain gets in, wood rots, bricks crumble. By 500 years it has lost most of its original defining characteristics, it is falling into a state of high entropy. It is becoming a mound of rubble. Pour sand out of a 1000 buckets. At first the sand is shaped by the shape of the bucket, but then when it leaves the bucket that structure is lost. Pouring more sand on the floor, on top of the other sand does nothing to lower the state of entropy. Systems fall into decay. Unravelling the decay, creating some semblance of order brings about a different structure a different level of entropy