Hell, some things like knives and cutting boards, I clean while I'm cooking. While I'm waiting for something to finish roasting or frying, I'm already cleaning my work area. Usually, the only dishes that are left over are plates, forks, and glasses.
And it's part of the day. Brushing your teeth takes time. Taking a shower takes time. Getting dressed takes time. You have to decide that you are a person who takes time to cook, not spend 15 more minutes on Twitter.
I'm not some rural hippy who has no real job, living off of the land, disconnected from the pace of life. We live the DC metro area. And by that, I don't mean we live in a mansion in Herndon or Reston, I mean we live in an a small apartment in Alexandria. I'm the CTO of a technology consulting firm. We have only one car between my wife and me, which she drives, and I take public transit everywhere.
If you don't feel like doing the dishes every day, you can just stack them up and do them once a week...
We probably had a bit more "bland" — I couldn't help being British — but we'd also go shopping once a week, cook most evenings, and vary between short/long prep/cooking time things. We'd sometimes use semi-prepared foods, (British-)Indian curry pastes were used relatively often, but something like a "make tacos kit" was expensive for what it contained, and only used once or twice before we'd work out how to make it ourselves.
Also, being four 18 year olds, we were never able to make leftovers last until the next day :-D
(None of this was unusual in Britain; /not/ doing this was unusual.)
Dinner in my household is not difficult or fussy or unhealthy or expensive or bland.
We don't buy food every day, but we also don't buy processed food. We eat fresh meat and vegetables, with small servings of simple carbohydrates, going to the grocery store once a week. Our trips come out to about $100 total, which is about $2/meal per person.
I make dinner from scratch almost every night. I design it to leave leftovers for lunch the next day. It takes no more time to make four servings than two for most things. This means that the time I spend on dinner saves time on lunch.
Once a week, I make a meal designed to leave a LOT of leftovers, like a roast chicken or tacos or chili. Roast chicken takes a long time to cook, but takes almost no prep-time. Tacos take a little prep time, but almost no time to cook. Chili takes a lot of prep time, a lot of cooking time (if you want to do it right), but makes so damn much that we freeze half so we don't burn out on eating it for the entirety of the week.
And don't get me wrong: we don't eat the same thing every night. I'm somewhat of a fussy eater. I don't mean there are only a few things that I will eat, I mean I am very intolerant of poorly prepared food. We eat extremely well in my house.
Oh yeah, there are nights where I say to myself, "damn, I'm just too tired to make anything special". That's when we eat the leftover, frozen chili. Or I dice up the leftover chicken from the roast and make a chicken salad out of it and we have sandwiches. Or we have tacos a second night, because we freakin' love tacos (I could eat tacos for every meal, and I know this because I have done it before).
Eating well doesn't mean complexity, it doesn't mean expense. Simple food, the right symphony of spices, and the correct cooking method. It's no different than programming.