What are engineers, architects, and craftsmen but translators of spoken word (or ideas) to various media or physical representations?
One could argue that the greatest achievements of history were essentially composed of seemingly mundane tasks.
We'd all love to feel like we're doing more than that, perhaps by creating intelligence in some form. Maybe as software engineers we can create as you say "simple formulas that evolve a solution" - and those kinds of algorithms/solutions seem to be long overdue - I think we're definitely headed in that direction. But at some point, even those solutions may not be entirely satisfying to the creative mind - after all, once we teach computers to arrive at solutions themselves, can we really take credit for the solutions that are found?
If one is after lasting personal fulfillment, maybe it'd be more effective to apply his or her skills (whatever they may be) more directly to the benefit and wellbeing of other people.