I escaped the boredom by becoming very proficient in a popular open source project that I found interesting and that multiple companies are looking to hire for.

I escaped the boredom by becoming very proficient in a popular open source project that I found interesting and that multiple companies are looking to hire for. While the business requirements for the features I have to add may come from my employer sometimes, for the most part I'm really just working on upstream and making it better. I've also job hopped a fair bit to try to find a job where there was motivation on both sides before getting to this point, so your tale is somewhat familiar. Perhaps you could aim for something similar. There's employers out there (eg. RedHat) that will happily pay you to hack on open source if you can show that it's in both of your best interests. That way you get to choose what you're working on going in. Even just specialising a bit more might make things more interesting as you'll be hired to work on <thing you actually quite like> instead of some random stack put together by someone who may not have a clue. Good luck in your search :)