Engineering is about making tradeoffs. You consider all the factors, optimize for the ones that are most important, and make the best choices based on that.
Put in that way, engineering is pretty damn boring. It’s not easy. But being difficult doesn’t necessarily make something interesting.
In my younger days, I put a lot of energy into exploring the latest fads and keeping up with “best practices,” all in the hopes of becoming a better software engineer. I do that a lot less these days–only as much as I need to for work. Anyone who genuinely gets off on “best practices” is a bit suspect in my book.
At some point, I think my interest in coding changed from “is this well written software?” to something like “what kind of thinking does this code imply about how it solves the problem?”
This is way more interesting! Even so-called “bad” code can be very interesting and teach you something about a unique way to approach the problem it solves.
Obviously, we can’t spend all our time appreciating various aspects of less-than-optimal code. There’s work to be done, efficiency to be measured, best practices to follow. It’s not like we got into coding because we enjoyed thinking or anything.