Well, the way it plays out in practice is that I have a certain finite number of job offers to choose between. Each of them will teach me something. Each of them will give me a chance to accomplish something. Each of them may be more or less enjoyable. And each of them will pay me something.
And I'm saying that since I'm relatively early in my career, it makes sense to optimize for the ones that teach me a lot and let me accomplish a lot, even if they don't pay as much. That doesn't mean ignore money. If I have an offer that will teach me more, pay me more, and let me accomplish more, it's a no-brainer to take it. But if I have one that'll teach me more and have me working on highly-visible projects, vs. another that pays more but has me writing CRUDscreens that nobody but a few Intranet departments will use, I'd rather take the one that teaches me more.
I understand our point - it's really a trade-off between things; and as well the situation is definitely more or less tough, depending on your area.
I totally agree with searching for jobs that actually teach you things does bring money on the long run.
Sidenote: I put an emphasis on 'actually' because it seems to me that it's difficult to know which job will teach you the most beforehands... It could be the CRUD one, if I use your example :)
For instance, in 2006, I had already been moving heavily from .Net to Ruby. Yet someone called me back with a .Net project in mind. I went there just by principle - and ended up doing data aggregation, continuous integration at a scale I had never done before! This has heavily influenced what I do today.
As well I was working as a consultant for a large bank, promoting application infrastructure (services, ioc etc), continuous integration, testing practices. Before that, I could possibly have told that bank was boring and I wouldn't learn anything - it was the other way round in the end.
In my experience, "optimizing experience" is not a stage with our kind of job, it's the whole career.
As such, I've always cared to optimize earnings at the same time. Not ask huge amounts of money, but remain careful about that.