As someone who takes a professional interest in the agendas of Liverpool Council's regular planning committees meetings, I have, in recent years, often found myself frustrated.
Like most people who live here, I want to see Liverpool prosper and on too many occasions I have glanced hopefully at the list of proposed developments for the city and found it to be sadly lacking. Where we would like to see new housing developments and big ticket companies setting up offices, we have instead seen repeated plans for home conversions, convenience stores and 5G masts.
It's not always fair to compare Liverpool with Manchester, but they are our nearest city rival and at the moment it feels like when Manchester is awash with major developments while Liverpool is dealing with Houses of Multiple Occupancy and other smaller proposals.
Now let's be clear, Liverpool has come an enormously long way since the tough days of mass unemployment and industrial decline in the 1980s and early 90s. The city is now a major global tourist hub, with a huge visitor economy, great universities and a famous hospitality offer.
But if the renaissance this city has experienced was borne out of the glory of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture year in 2008 and the transformational project that was Liverpool One, it has felt for some time like the city needs its next big moment - and it could be just around the corner.
Say it quietly, but there is a feeling of some momentum gathering in terms of the exciting and potentially pivotal plans and proposals that could shape Liverpool over the next decade or so. Let's not forget, the city and its council have taken a reputational battering in recent years following the corruption scandal that will see formerly key figures from the administration face trials over the next couple of years.
That will all have had a knock on investor confidence in the city, but with the council now back on track and a regional mayor in Steve Rotheram who appears to be himself growing in confidence - there are some promising signs arriving.
Now much of this naturally focuses on the city centre, which is of course Liverpool's economic heartbeat, but there is widespread talk now of how connecting the centre with the north of the city through the historic docks is the big show in town.
I won't need to remind readers - particularly those of a Blue persuasion - of the stunning new stadium that has opened at Bramley Moore Dock and is welcoming more than 50,000 fans for every home game. But it is now the areas between the Hill Dickinson Stadium and the bright lights of the business district that city chiefs are getting all excited about.
Last week, Mayor Rotheram officially launched a new mayoral development corporation, which could, if carried out correctly, be the vehicle that drives transformational change in the city's northern docks.
The new corporation has already earmarked a huge 147-hectare area of mainly brownfield land stretching from the River Mersey to the city's Pumpfields and commercial districts where it is believed a total of 17,500 homes and five million sq ft of new commercial space can be created.
The new zone will also bring together three of the ongoing developments that are huge causes for optimism amongst those plotting out Liverpool's next chapter.
This includes Peel's ongoing development of Central Docks, where the government has kicked in £55m towards plans to create 2,350 new homes.
It also involves the council's ongoing work to create Liverpool's first Grade A office scheme in a decade - as well as a new urban park - on land at Pall Mall in the business district.
But the scheme causing the most buzz around the corridors of power in the Cunard Building and Mann Island is the one being brought forward by Liverpool's richest ever son, Tom Morris of Home Bargains fame.
On land at Gibraltar Row, close to the Strand and known to some as the King Edward Triangle, TJ Morris and its partners are plotting a £1 billion scheme of huge new skyscrapers which, they say, will also include the city's first five-star hotel, Liverpool's tallest building and a new 25,000 sq ft events arena.
Those who have watched exciting development plans for this city appear and fall away or drag on for excruciating periods will rightly be cynical that transformational schemes like this will ever see the light of day - but ask anyone in the sector and they will tell you that the financial heft of the Home Bargains empire means this one can get moving right away.
These plans all fold into the emerging idea that Liverpool's city centre can essentially be expanded to take in the space - much of it derelict former docklands - that lies between the business district and the Blues' new stadium.
Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of this vision comes from council planners, who are imagining a world where one of the city's busiest intersections, the junction between Great Howard Street and Leeds Street could be effectively sunk below ground and covered over with a new surface-level pedestrian plaza and transit hub.
This is part of the council's wider vision for the city's historic waterfront, which is seeking to reinvogorate the iconic 10km stretch of coastline between Otterspool in the south and Bramley-Moore in the north, with ideas for new parks, pools and even a beach along the way.
If all this sounds ambitious, that's because it is and so it should be. Liverpool has been waiting for its transformational next moment since the heady days of 2008. If those in charge get this right, what is planned could be even bigger.