I've been an independent consultant / contractor for over 20 years. I don't esp. defend clients, they don't know what they want and tend to change their mind often, but they're a million times better than a bad boss. (A good boss, I don't know, I never had one.)

In the last 14 months I switched to making physical products sold to end users (b2c) and it's great, but having clients wasn't that bad.