Also, most of mobile development seems to be writing another UI for sensors or
SQLite database, or sometimes another game like the plenty out there. Why
would anybody think of that as exciting?
Personally, my typical web app is not CRUD, it's merely an R. And I don't write those daily. Much more often I write network or system daemons.
That's why REST and JSON are great. Very simple and perfect for many web use cases.
Indeed. To avoid the CRUD groundhog day, I'd stay away from both web and mobile.
Games, Desktop apps, Industrial, embedded, ...
Personally I do desktop applications and love it.
I simply don't believe that a domain (understood broadly, ie. desktop/mobile/web) in and of itself dictates whether projects are original and interesting.
Not until you work on something really specialized, like AI etc.
They are usually only interesting if they are desktop apps because they have to, like image editors, games, CAD.
My test for interesting work is the fraction of lines of code that relates to processing data and not just input/presentation/persistence/validation.
Other people have different definitions for "exciting". Don't knock someone else's idea of it just because you don't agree with it.
What I generally do is write web apps, and much of my enjoyment comes from figuring out how to creatively use other people's libraries and to write very DRY code.
The libraries I use abstract browser fragmentation away from my presentation layer, so I don't have to do endless run-debug-fix loops on the front end.
At this point, the code I write for each new project is 90%+ unique to the project and very thin, so I get to do the fun part of releasing and iterating it.