That is a lot of fun to do, most times. Also I need to provide for my family and the guys who pay my salary want their stupid features implemented like yesterday.

like with many jobs you're learning to only do the work that matters, and oftentimes when you can avoid doing work that actually improves the product.

There's a reason why construction workers aren't making their own planks and nails, that would be horribly time consuming, inefficient, and they'd probably make shitty planks.

Over the past month I feel like all I've been doing is writing tech design documents for systems I don't actually know anything about because I haven't had the opportunity to go in and do anything with them.

Fortunately I've finally managed to reach the point where everyone agrees that we should just start implementing the basics and see how that goes rather than try to plan it all out ahead of time since we're surely going to have to throw out the later plans once we see what we're actually dealing with.

Absolutely. I barely touch code anymore, but I talk about how to touch code a lot.