jaxbot, I was a hiring manager at a major Silicon Valley semiconductor company for many years before I retired.
Unfortunately, the CS degree really does open doors. If you're good, you can skip the degree. But you must be really good. Honestly, the best engineer I worked with in my whole career (and who was on my staff) was a high-school dropout. But he was incredibly great, and devoured books on languages and software engineering. He is the kind of guy that would have a relevant input about "Is Haskell or Lisp a better language?"
But not having a degree did limit his career. He always had work because everyone loved him and knew he was brilliant and humble. But doors that might have been open to him were closed. Every choice in life has a cost.
There really is some benefit to doing the degree. It will force you to dig into some areas that you might not have dug into manually. Algorithms, data structures, discrete math, linear algebra, calculus, compilers, languages, computer architecture, etc. You need all that stuff to be a great SW engineer.
My advise to you is to get the degree but treat it as your "day job." Then, do what you're really passionate about. Take grad level courses, or just do random stuff that you think is cool and put it in github.
I interviewed thousands of new college grads. About 75% of them absolutely suck. The guys who I made offers to were almost always guys who did stuff on their own. Right before I retired, the last guy I made a job offer to showed me an app he had written for his iphone that simulated how particles diffuse in a solvent, and his resume showed a link to the code that he wrote.
His GPA was only a 3.5. But I totally got him: he was great because he had a passion for digging into stuff, and not just for jumping through professors' hoops.
In general, the correlation I found between GPA and competence was this:
Obviously, I'm generalize and there are always exceptions. But if you interview thousands of candidates you see the trend.