I strongly agree with your point [1]. I think the 10x programmer exists, and the phenomenon is primarily as you describe: you spend a long time figuring out how to do something with a lot of moving parts and hidden gotchas. You eventually track down every bug, resolve every misunderstanding, reorganize and simplify, and you remember what you learned.

Next time something similar arises, you blow the doors off anyone else starting from scratch. I've done it myself, and it has be to quite common.

I disagree with your point [2], though, at least in part. I would get bored, too, if all I ever did was to repeat things I had figured out years earlier, but if I put the effort into figuring out how to do something hard, I want to USE that hard-earned knowledge more than once. I don't want to always be a slow, awkward newbie at everything I do, which is what I am the first time I tackle most new, serious challenges, but I don't want to stop tackling new challenges either. I'd prefer a mix of the two: sometimes a newbie, sometimes an expert.

I think we actually agree on point [2] ... using the hard-earned knowledge again while solving a new problem (of sufficient complexity) still requires significant problem-solving (puzzle solving?) skills. I've also mastered making web interfaces that perform CRUD operations against databases ... I don't want to spend my career reliving the ground-hog day of CRUD interfaces.

I still think we disagree a little on [2], but I love your "Groundhog Day" metaphor. It's perfect, couldn't be better. If you've seen the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, you'll know what I mean when I say that sometimes that's exactly what I want. I want to be the guy who has lived this day before and looks like a genius to all those mere mortals who are experiencing it for the first time. It feels great to have such a huge advantage, especially when it was earned.

But, like you, I don't want to be stuck there. I want to experience it often, but I want to have plenty of new days, too.