From the developer's point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.
That does not seem to be true in many B2B areas. Software suppliers are selling maintenance and support contracts to their customers. Think ERP.
What is actually being sold is a promise, and that really comes from the sales department, not the engineering department. Once the customer signs the contract, the incentive is to do the minimum possible to keep the promise--or better said, break it infrequently and non-egregiously enough that the customer doesn't churn (or sue). So you'll unfortunately still be viewed as a cost-center at many companies if you're working on this stuff.
In my experience, if anything development support/maintenance is delivering too much in many cases, i. e. not limiting themselves to fixing bugs, but enhancing functions on customer request.
It depends on the incentives I suppose - if commission and bonuses for sales people comes only from new sales, then sure, maintenance is irrelevant and will be ignored.
>> Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.
No, that's not true at all. If sales people are properly incentivised to sell support contracts (their base salary being a percent of maintenance fee for example) then it will be sold like crazy. I have seen this happen at my company - at one point we did not need new sales to be profitable - just raking support contracts fees was enough to keep up costs and then some.
More support contract does not mean company will assign more resources into maintenance of software itself.
This is why I do not work for faceless corporation. I deliberately sticked with small lifestyle business that values maintenance as much as new sales (as a matter of fact just this week I was refactoring my own, original piece of code, that its first version is dated by versions control as written 15 years ago and during this whole time there were clients that were paying support fees for it)