Yes, I had the same conclusion about careful project picking and greenfield projects did seem to hold more promise than others. I've found that its kinda hard to get on prominent greenfield projects as one of the founding members though, without some 'in'. Many of the ones I've looked at, by the time they start staffing publicly, have picked a bunch of the staff level folks via networks. My experience might be narrow on this though.

I meant in your place of work. It's still generally the case that you won't be picked for flagship projects, but you can get better at finding remaining opportunities than others are.

My personal experience - after nearly 3 years at my current employer working mostly on features and bug fixes for existing big projects, I've found myself at the centre of several greenfield projects that fit my expertise perfectly. I am now one of "the guys" to go to about these exciting long term projects, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Unless being life support if what you want to be known for: the superhero that can work with shitty code bases and get results while improving them. Guess what most software company have: plenty of shitty but mission critical code!

There's nothing as uniquely shitty as getting placed on a floundering project, being told it can't be allowed to fail, and then getting absolutely no staff or resources to prevent that from happening.