Infrastructure that works has very little drama. Without drama, you're not in anyone's sphere of attention, and being outside that, there's no reason to be sexy.

I agree. I'm a sysadmin myself, and the best congratulations I've ever had was after heavy rewrite of a firewall script (old one was a mix of three different styles, unmanagable mess after several years of work), when my colleague asked me when I'm going to deploy the new firewall, two or three weeks after it actually went into production. It was so smooth that nobody noticed.