For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
Exactly. Under feudalism, there's no "disrupting" established lords regardless of the pitch or your personal connections; even if one wanted to be your patron the others would probably gang up on them. This is basically why Russia is still using 99.9% old Soviet technology. They haven't given themselves titles yet but oligarchs are basically feudal lords, Kamil Galeev has gone into more detail about that specific case.
To be fair, most the soviet stuff was well made in ways lots of modern stuff just isn't. Like up untill the very recent period we didn't have any space flight capacity but the old soviet stuff was still going strong.
It's true. They set out to be hyper-progressive science people, and in some ways succeeded. Their engineers were always decent, and when a factory could source the stuff they needed good stuff was built.