I think, for a lot of people, solving the problem was always the fun part.

There is immense pleasure in a nice piece of code - something that is elegant, clever and simple at the same time.

Grinding out code to get something finished - less fun…

It depends. Sometimes they joy is in discovering what problem you are solving, by exploring the space of possibilities on features and workflows on a domain.

For that, having elegant and simple software is not needed; getting features fast to try out how they work is the basis of the pleasure, so having to write every detail by hand reduces the fun.