Gold. Pure gold.
I've long wandered in the wilderness. I've had years of writing bullshit business applications. I've even dabbled in investment banking (where programmers, excluding quants, are the second lowest paid professionals at the bank, only higher than support/IT people). I've worked on bullshit semi-startups.
Now I work for Google where ironically... I write internal applications. This may seem like a cruel joke but it's really not. There is so much respect for engineering as a craft here that it occurred to me that it's not the writing bullshit business applications that was sapping my will to live, it was the business-types who so consistently treated engineering as an interchangeable cost center.
I've done the freelancing thing too. Never again. The world is full of delusional people who think they're the next Steve Jobs and that their idea, by itself, is worth something (it's worth precisely nothing).