I'm sapiosexual, so really hot and not all that clever can't co-occur from my perspective. But education is orthogonal to intelligence and really not a factor. I'd probably find e.g. an intelligent woman raised in a hunter-gatherer society more attractive than an equally intelligent woman educated in an academic field I don't respect.
10 000 hours is the number observed among elite performers (Olympic athletes, chess grandmasters, concert level musicians and the like) - I don't think most people complaining about the difficulty of contemporary dating are aiming to be in the top 1%.
I think you're onto something. It seems like thinking about 'meta-relationships' tends to depersonalize the individual interactions and devalue the individuals involved. It's as though successful relationships are a fitting problem, and looking at the macro environment strips out the individual quirks which optimize for one's own fit.
If that kind of thinking were helpful, I think we'd have evolved to have a very accurate guess as to what the majority of our preferred demographic finds attractive - but apart from psychopaths, most of us don't. the optimal mating strategy doesn't actually seem to be to work to approach some generic ideal, but to be most authentically and extremely oneself, then filter out everyone who doesn't like that. It's intuitive why looking too seriously at averages distracts from that project.
This field has its own version of Pascal's wager - if magic isn't real, knowing that puts one in a minority of people correct about the matter globally but only reduces social friction in a modern western society. If it is real, it has the potential for a Copernican-scale revolution in worldview. So it's a question worth taking seriously.
I suspect a Copernican revolution of that nature would only happen with some kind of innovation that's too big to be ignored, people have been publishing rigorous experiments on magic for decades and they're just too easy to ignore. I hope we can see an outflow of noetic science into noetic engineering.
