Could a CS degree get you interested in a topic you will never excel at?

Most people don't excel. If you can handle the weeder classes, you're already ahead. Practice doesn't make perfect, but it does make it permanent. Keep going if you can.

It's a risk with any degree. Engineering degrees particularly have the problem that people go into them because their family pressures them to, they think it is a meal ticket, etc.

It might be worse in 2022 just because so many people are getting degrees in CS.

I was a little shocked to hear that my uni (Cornell) has 2000 majors in the CS, Information Science and Statistics and Data Science departments which are all under the CIS school.

There are multiple ways to succeed in CS though. At the PhD and professor level you get ahead in CS by going to conferences and presenting papers, not by writing code. Some academic CS people are great programmers, some of them aren't.

In industry it's the same thing: it takes different skills to develop software so somebody who is good at some things and not good at other things can have a successful career.

Computing is such a big field which is on a healthy growth trajectory so even if you are average or a little below average you have better career prospects than most people, it's not like being an actor where you need top rate talent and luck to get anything at all.

The hardest thing was already achieved, being interest.

"Never excel at" - excel at what?

In what time frame?

What is the definition of "excel" being applied?

What expectation is not being met such that a topic of interest is no longer worth spending any time on?

Many people make solid contributions consisting of a body of standard work, over an entire lifetime. But for the few that "excelled", many will tell you it was the culmination of, or a lucky break during, many years/decades of work that positioned them uniquely when a need or opportunity arose.

So that sounds like a lottery, and one sure way of never winning the lottery is never buying a ticket.

Not everyone can win a Nobel prize, just based on the number of them available.

Regardless, in today's world there are quite a few degrees available which might be considered wasted effort, but I would suggest a CS degree is not one of them, even if only by signalling that holder was able to gain such a degree.

It depends on what your goals are for the degree. If you are seeking knowledge and you successful compete the degree it was no waste of effort. If, as seems implied in the question, you want to excel (financially or n intellectual standing) a CS degree presents any greater risk than any other. One thing you could do is talk to people who have graduated from the same program of study 5 years ago and ask them how satisfied them are with their decision.

Absolutely! I've been fascinated by FP since attending a seminar in 1983. I'm absolutely hopeless at thinking that way but obsessed with trying to understand the paradigm. I finally did the glasgow haskell course 4 years ago, hasn't made me any wiser, not withstanding it's a great course, the fault is mine.