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.