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Bah, people waste time with things they aren't competitive with all the time. Having been on both the hiring, and the being hired, side of the equation, I can tell you, it's often just about showing up and being pleasant to work with. No one person I've ever worked with was ever perfect at all aspects of their job. We are all good enough. When the printer jams, we all try taking it apart and pushing random buttons together, and suddenly it miraculously works again, and we have no idea why. We don't live at risk of being eaten by tigers any more and the world isn't as dog-eat-dog as you seem to think. (If it is that high-pressure where you are, go somewhere else and find some new friends! Because it's not like that for most of us.) It is entirely possible to be merely adequate at your job, whatever it may be, and do just fine. You will not starve on the street or be ridiculed by your peers. The modern problem seems to be one of too much choice. All of us have so many possible paths open to us that will allow us to feed ourselves that it becomes difficult to decide on one. Because we exist in such a fortunate era of history where we do have choices, we are encouraged to find our "passion." There's some intense psychological pressure involved in that. You aren't allowed to just enjoy the people you work with and do a decent job any more. You have to be passionate! But the world needs plumbers, and car washers, and accountants, and internal database managers, and not every moment of those people's days is going to be passionate. It's all gotten a little out of hand. Bottom line, find something you can do and do it. If you want to be a composer, be a composer. If you want to be a plumber by day, and compose by night so that you don't have to worry about the bills, do that. It's your life. Do what you like. Do what you need to. Do a decent job. But don't expect a lightening bolt out of the blue to suddenly illuminate what you are "supposed" to do with your life and don't get preachy about what other people choose to do with theirs. Thousands of generations of hunter gatherers and farmers had no choice in how they spent their days, and they were happy enough.

I guess you want to have it both ways, but the whole "impressing a large audience = justified" is what gets me. Consider that Van Gogh sold only a single painting in his life - Only one! He didn't keep painting because he sought to impress an audience during his lifetime or presume there would be one in the future. He simply must have found it rewarding. That's enough justification for any artist to keep going and I'm sure Van Gogh felt, as you said, like he couldn't stop even if he wanted too. That's all based on assumption and speculation in Van Gogh's case, but I can tell you first hand that's how I feel as a composer.

Fundamentally you should be writing music for yourself first. Do you derive any enjoyment from it? If not, then why are you doing it? Secondly, we are fortunate to live in a time with the technology where one's music, if not ever played live, can be realized with a good approximation of what it should sound like and thanks to the internet with forums like this one, you actually can have your music heard. Undoubtedly, there are countless talented composers both professional and amateur in the past who likely wrote wonderful music that sadly is lost to us and never had these advantages. I don't think the "quality" of the music, however that is determined, should be the justification. No one writes "good" music in a vacuum right out of the gate; even among the greats, it took a long process of hard work, false starts, learning from mistakes, before they reached their potential.

I'd have to disagree with the idea that 'impressing' listeners (or being a well-known composer) makes what one composer does any more justified than another, nor do I feel a composer has wasted their time by default if neither of these traits is applicable to them.

But of course, if you keep going you will get better. The people I know who make a living in the arts weren't all necessarily the most gifted people to start with. But they loved it enough to keep going when everyone else stopped. Often, the things we have natural talent for don't interest us very much. They come too easily. The rewards feel that much greater when we finally begin to master something that is very difficult.