I do find it poetic, but in seriousness I think if folks don't actually feel hopeful about what they're doing then they should do something else - leave the work / research direction / engineering / comms / whatnot to whoever actually feels hope about it...

To elaborate, the thing that's poetic for me about "our hopeless cause" is because I have hope that is not cleanly legible to the outside, easy to write off as "hopeless". And it's important to stay in tune with your own knowings about this stuff. I think there are very deleterious effects from throwing energy into things one doesn't have hope in.

(...And to elaborate further, mostly I think the bad stuff happens by lending support to corrupt things. And imo being pushed to work on X while you lack hope in X is a solid flag of corruption.)