Love the post, Carl. It resonated with me. I had the 3-volume boxed set of TAOCP on my office bookshelf for 2 decades. (I recently donated the books to the corporate library.) Much like you, I never read them cover-to-cover, but I did find little useful elements in them. I remember once being particularly frustrated by how the elevators in our office building operated, so I turned to Knuth, and found a rudimentary elevator algorithm, which I Puckishly sent to the facilities managers.

I did read most of Knuth’s Literate Programming, and was particularly fascinated with his one-line daily logs of his work on TeX.