[gyepi]

This is a good question. I've worked in a lot of different domains and can tell you that:

1. They all have boring parts

2. They all have interesting parts.

3. Doing the interesting parts well can be very challenging.

CRUD is only boring because of the generally repetitious nature of talking to the database, but repetition usually means that it can be generated. Whenever possible, I write code generators for that sort of thing. This is not only more interesting and gives me time to solve the more interesting problems but also allows me to produce more and better code than I could just typing it all out.

You could get a PhD, I suppose, but hard problems generally require the insight to see them and the willingness and ability to work on them. Sometimes ability requires a PhD, but that's not a given.