//Of course this is my view after having spent non-trivial amounts of time making code beautiful, modular and reusable instead of trying to solve the problem at hand.

I can identify with that feeling. working at a startup made me realize that i have spent more time reading code than writing code. While that's not a bad thing on it's own, i had lost sight of the joy from building/improving things/product. I have been programming for 4-5 years now and pissed that i don't have a product of my own(crappy/otherwise).