The historical question is very interesting, and I'm going to have to look into that more. But I suspect that artisans (a class that has changed a lot, if not died out completely) were very passionate about their work.

With the huge amount of hours that a knowledge worker spends at his day job, I personally feel that it's almost never worth it to have a job you don't enjoy. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do enough exciting things, once you subtract a healthy amount of sleep, maintenance tasks, and the day job. It certainly isn't worth it at the typically small compensation differences between jobs.