I also wanted to add about the myriad of incoming data formats that need to be processed and the myriad of data exports that one has to implement for most of those "boring" CRUD apps.

If one hasn't written code that includes comments like "Special case, California does it this way" or "Alberta needs an .xml export, not an .xsl one", with a link to a .pdf spec that points to somewhere on the internet, then he/she hasn't got to know what it really means to write a true and "boring" CRUD app.