Look at a magazine stand, these are the things people actually care about. If you think of something people care about that isn't on the magazine stand, consider starting one and filling the niche.
Why is it that we would focus on all the things people do not actually care about, as opposed to the things they actually do? Let learning be a pull process, not a push process. You pull in the skills you need to do things well, you don't learn all the things you might need, only to discover you didn't need them.
Shoving information into peoples heads and hoping that it leads to utility somehow in the future is a long shot when compared to using utility itself to pull the required knowledge as needed, and you then have a 100 percent hit rate on the cache. You're never filling your cache up with junk.
Some exceptions to this exist, obviously, such as language, speech, writing, math up to algebra, some geometry, logic, ethics, hygiene, and success tactics such as delayed gratification, goal setting, teamwork, etc.
Those subjects have the largest amplification effect on other subjects. Some other subjects are better endpoints than starting points, and it would be great if the people that loved those subjects wouldn't try and pretend they were good amplification starting points.
The mastery learning you linked to seems to beat a dead horse? More profit can be had by giving up on some hard things and returning to them after you've tried learning things you weren't burnt out on yet. Some people will just always hate a certain subject. If you require 90 percent performance before you move on to the next thing, you lose the profit of task switching for freshness.
Also, this seems to unrelated to the point of better subjects. If teaching technology doubled in effectiveness overnight, you're still learning things you can't make money with and are unlikely to ever use, no matter how well you know it.