[sown]

I've been around engineering teams for a while now and here's what I mean: there's always some principal engineer or fellow (in the terms of a title) that is greatly esteemed and admired because of decades of progressively larger and larger feature creation and system architecture/leadership.

If all I ever do is fix bugs -- forever in my career -- it means I'm not going to build anything and I don't get to be on the team that gets the people to the stars because that team is reserved for aforementioned team of people who have built a lot.

I probably shouldn't be a programmer any more since all I'm good for is fixing bugs.

In the end you're probably right: I'm too dumb to get any better and maybe I should have just joined the Navy.