> I wonder about what in the software industry causes so many people to have similar "symptoms" from it.
By and large those who end up in the software industry are engineers at heart, and therefore want to be engineers, not just software developers.
That's why farming is the oft dreamed of escape. In farming you get to be (and have to be, if you want to remain competitive) a software engineer, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, structural engineer... and on and on. You get to actually solve problems for what they are instead of trying to force arbitrarily selected tools into searching for a problem.