Transportation / Infrastructure IB - Career Crossroad

Bit of a rant here, but am at a crossroads in  my career and would appreciate some advice / insight from my fellow monkeys.

Just got the A2A promotion at an upper-mid tier BB (think Citi, BofA, CS) in Industrials, and have spent the majority of the past two years primarily covering Transportation & Logistics.

Non-target background, haven't done much M&A as an analyst, and struck out pretty badly in buyside recruiting. I waited to recruit until after I got the promotion (probably a mistake, but didn't really have the time to learn the technicals I wasn't learning on the job). I also wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do for the next leg of my career, but knew it wasn't going to be vanilla MM PE (which is where most of my peers seemed to be heading).

Thus, having spent two years covering transportation and observing the macro environment for the last 18 months, one of my most interesting thematic takeaways was the freight and supply chain disruptions impacting all facets of the global economy. It seemed that the perfect intersection of my experience and interests lied in infrastructure investing, specifically within transportation infrastructure.

Unfortunately, it seemed that my lack of M&A experience (one failed middle market sellside) and weak technical performance got me dinged from like ten infra PE processes, and even an infra corp dev role which should have been easy money. I'm sure I could land more interviews, but I don't see these going materially different from the first set, and with work starting to ramp up again, it doesn't seem like the optimal allocation of my time and energy.

It seems that my best option is to pursue this interest in transportation infrastructure from the sellside. Seems like I'm in a great position to build my career in banking coming out of my analyst program. The comp is great, and I've spent two years learning how to navigate the hours and culture of my group (albeit the return-to-office has slightly dampened my WLB outlook). It also seems like I'm going to have to work hard to own my niche here and get some actual deal experience in the sector, which I could eventually leverage for an exit to one of the top players in infra banking (PJT, Evercore, Macqaurie, MS) at the senior associate / VP level. 

Would appreciate any input on this outlook from anyone who may have found themselves navigating similar situations. Not ashamed to say my ego took a massive hit from all of the rejections.