I enjoy programming games and other things as a hobby, but the work can fall short of your points especially in my experience in web development:
2. After days of work, your entire branch can be discarded when the feature spec changes
4. Repetitive tasks abound
5. Not so much creating from pure thoughtstuff, but rather intractable legacy codebases on top of bothersome system configuration
Your last quote sounds nice, but ignores the reality of coding. Even good coders have to write ugly (hard to maintain regardless of data structures) code sometimes. The real world just introduces edge cases which make even the most beautiful system have warts in places. Web development exposes concurrency, scaling and other things which can lead to tradeoffs against code cleanliness.
2. After days of work, your entire branch can be discarded when the feature spec changes 4. Repetitive tasks abound 5. Not so much creating from pure thoughtstuff, but rather intractable legacy codebases on top of bothersome system configuration
Your last quote sounds nice, but ignores the reality of coding. Even good coders have to write ugly (hard to maintain regardless of data structures) code sometimes. The real world just introduces edge cases which make even the most beautiful system have warts in places. Web development exposes concurrency, scaling and other things which can lead to tradeoffs against code cleanliness.