The way I see it is, if my bad timing manages to fuck some sort of career milestone, then I'm glad I paid myself first with a masters degree in something I wanted and got to spend a year in Monterey.
Yup, that pretty much summed up the reason I did it too. And one year isn't that bad to be behind, when it's actually not an entire year anyways.
And for comparison, I've actually finished ahead of some (not many) of my YG peers in helo-land. Attribute it to almost nil downtime between sections of the pipeline (with the exception of API for a few months). Go figure???