> If you are unable to find the flow and immerse yourself in your code for hours at a stretch find another career.

That's like suggesting a writer should find another career because they have writers block. Why not just find a new project and/or working conditions? You even said qualified your report on monster coders with "...as long as they believe that what they are doing is cool".

My experience is that great programmers are especially sensitive to what they're doing. If they can't get genuinely and deeply excited about a project you will never see them shine. I've seen some decent programmers who can churn out decent code like clockwork. As if they work in a factory pressing sheet metal. They can be pushed to work 80 hours easily, although a great programmer could probably achieve the same results in 8 minutes most of the time.