It is a fair question to ask: does the community truly need another journal in the bustling, highly saturated field of optics and photonics? When the landscape of optical publishing is already as densely packed as WDM, the justification for a new entrant must go beyond merely providing another venue. While we remain committed to the highest standards of peer-reviewed rigor for cutting-edge optical research, this journal was founded on the belief that the current format of scientific storytelling is incomplete. We tend to publish the destination, but we rarely map the journey.