I hear you. Agreed: based on the meeting I went to on Monday, without a project/vehicle, the topics/presentations would have seemed pretty arcane.
The "big" presentation was by two members who are setting up a business to produce "serviceable" li-ion battery modules. IE: assembling commodity prismatic cells into packs where individual cells can be very easily swapped out if/when they fail or suffer a performance loss out of proportion to the other cells. Without that ability, a bad cell will cause the remaining good cells in a module to be ruined fairly quickly, and with Li-Ion prices as high as they are, that's not something you want to happen.
I thought it was pretty clever. We've come full circle - the
"Edison" batteries that powered some EV's a century ago were also user-serviceable.
The new people at the meeting were probably pretty close to snoring though.