[timwiseman]

A beautiful comment and I think you add a lot of good thoughts. I must respectfully disagree with one point though: "my job is not programming. My job is delivering value using programming.

Semantics."

I'm not sure. More than once I have gotten lost adding features no one wanted because the process of doing it interested me, or I spent hours optimizing a routine because I just knew it could be improved even when what my users wanted was a new feature and the performance was acceptable.

When time is limited, focus on adding value through programming, not programming for its own sake or because the problem is interesting.