I don't understand where you're going with your "region / culture" thing. The rest of your comment makes it sound like your standards are just lower than mine. You describe your work as mostly tedium and say you don't have a problem with that. This is a state of affairs I will never ever accept for myself.

And I'm approaching 40 myself and have been a part of this industry since the late 90s, so I'm not speaking out of youthful naiveté either, but rather from the vantage point of a conscious set of choices I've made on personal values and introspection into my own psychological needs.

The set of people who share such values/needs may or may not be a majority, but I never claimed they were. This discussion was originally on the broken state of open source, and my contention is that a lot of people who do open source probably do it because they're a little bit like me, frustrated with their day jobs, and looking for a way to contribute to the world in line with personal values that are similar to mine, and an outlet for unmet psychological needs similar to mine.

The majority of programming is tedium, that's my experience. The fun stuff is over early on in most projects. The rest is grinding it out, and incremental polishing to get the code base to a bulletproof level of reliability. I have worked on large commercial embedded code-bases that absolutely needed to have zero crashing bugs with months, if not years of uptime. Maybe you haven't encountered that. Its not surprising since few programmers today seem to care about that sort of reliability. I don't know what "standards" you're setting for yourself, but I'm glad you're happy doing your thing.

It's surprising you haven't encountered different programming cultures in the world. The bay area has a distinct culture than eastern Europe which is different than China or India. And this co-relates to varying attitudes on open source and other down-stream effects. Naturally these also differ from industry to industry.

Do you actually have any first-hand experience with what cultures are like in Eastern Europe or China or India? Or do you just live in the Bay Area, assuming your culture is superior to everyone else's?

And what makes you assume I haven't encountered different [programming] cultures around the world? ...because I have.

Yes, I have first hand experience. Where are you getting this superiority angle? It would be better for you to ask what I think rather than make stuff up.