The answer, of course, is that the "good stuff" is subjective (and almost never aligned with "the biggest value opportunities", ick).
Yes, CRUD pays. Being able to make more CRUD in less time (and/or CRUD that is better performing or more maintainable, etc...) is a valuable skill.
But it's boring. And more, it's just not impressive in the same way that, say, qemu/kvm is (or Mesa, or Linux, or llvm, etc...) That stuff is hard, and fun, and interesting in a way that CRUD will never be. So it has value too, and IMHO it's entirely reasonable to celebrate its practitioners even if they don't make as much money as CRUD jockeys like Zuckerberg do.
I agree, the classic engineers like to work problems with an easily definable end result (so that business types don't tell them what to write).
It's a pity though, there's a huge space of products that are needed but the talent is going into slugging it out in societally useless and relatively low paying niches (such as many of the most talented programmers entering the game industry or social networking or linux kernels). Meanwhile dumbasses are raking in millions with shit like SAP and the like.
While I agree on your remark about talented programmers in game and linux kernels. I don't necessarily agree with lumping social networking with the two fields aforementioned. I also disagree of your remark about SAP.
I don't necessarily agree with SAP or SAP consultants but there are cases where people would prefer to use SAP to implement some of their core: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-a-Hybrid-Cloud-a.... SAP is a complex, specialized tools that requires specific knowledge on how to tame it.
(I'm not arguing if complexity is good, bad, or anything like that. I'm focusing on what SAP is good at).
Yes, CRUD pays. Being able to make more CRUD in less time (and/or CRUD that is better performing or more maintainable, etc...) is a valuable skill.
But it's boring. And more, it's just not impressive in the same way that, say, qemu/kvm is (or Mesa, or Linux, or llvm, etc...) That stuff is hard, and fun, and interesting in a way that CRUD will never be. So it has value too, and IMHO it's entirely reasonable to celebrate its practitioners even if they don't make as much money as CRUD jockeys like Zuckerberg do.