As a breeder, I had limited creative control. I could mess around with around 10% of the effort. Everything else was meeting market specs (boring as fuck actually). Origami and Bacir is from that 10% messing around over some drinks in cooperation with some other breeders. Origami is a cross between a cantaloupe out of Mexico and Italian type. Bacir is a cross between a honeydew and a charentais (the only one that didn't pop open on the bottom.)

Pumpkins - Nobody knew what the fuck they were doing. The breeder was a classic absent minded professor who was trying everything for fun. He got a ton of cool new genetics from a farmer in Michigan. So I got to play little kid in the pumpkin patch. I had around a 95% success rate on picking the winners at first glance. 100% creative freedom, it's was a hell of a lot of fun for about 3 weeks of the year...

Watermelons was a slog- the breeder couldn't give me much to work with due to severe historical underfunding. I was mainly trying to get he the funding she needed and build the program up where it should have been.

If you notice there are no cucumbers. I ran into big issues with a breeder who screwed the pooch big time. He fucked up so badly he got an early retirement and I basically had to restart the entire program with a newly mint PhD with zero experience. Took me a few years to retrain that shiney new PhD from all the stupid shit his doctorate taught him. It takes around 10 years to make a new variety and I had moved on by then.