Ask HN: Career advice for a torn developer

Throwaway account, because I've been a member here almost 3 years. I'm struggling. In my day job, I work with .NET on a nightmarish codebase that was written in .NET 1.1 a few years ago by outsourced developers. Management doesn't care about the low code quality--just pumping out new features that get precariously bolted on to the existing pile of shit. Same old story, I know. The problem is, I'm having an increasingly tough time swallowing this bitter medicine in exchange for a paycheck. All my time at home is spent working with OSS technologies--I'm up every morning at 5am playing around with ruby and learning rails for a couple hours before work. The frustrating thing is knowing that without quitting my day job and holing up in my office for a while, I won't be able to increase the rate of my learning beyond what I can get done in two hours each morning plus weekends. I am at one productivity level with the .NET stack, and a much lower productivity level with everything else. The cognitive dissonance that causes is like a little devil on my left shoulder whispering, "If you were using C# and T-SQL, you'd be done already. You could have already written your own ORM--who needs ActiveRecord?" and a little cherub on my right shoulder: "No no, this is good for you. Keep working, stay motivated, and soon you'll be more productive using Rails, you'll have all sorts of projects for people to use on github, and your life will be complete." At this point, I think the fat little cherub is blowing smoke. I must be doing something right in .NET land, because former coworkers are actively seeking me out to work with them again--but I'm just not that into it. I've tried to tell myself that the technology doesn't matter, that there's no reason to shy away from .NET... but I'm scarred by what I've seen. In my experience, .NET makes certain things so easy that you just don't have to care about doing things the right way--and I've spent the majority of my nascent career cleaning up the messes this causes. I'm not a fan of these whiny, "help me figure out my life" posts (even after writing one), so part of me wouldn't mind or be surprised if this just disappeared in the froth. However, the other part of me would love some opinions: Should I just stick it out for a while, save dough, then quit and hole up for six months, hopefully coming out the other end with the necessary skills to work in a ruby shop? Should I start contacting places I'd like to work and see if they'd take on a young, seriously motivated former .NET dev who wants nothing more than to learn how to do things The Right Way using OSS? "Build something" will probably be the overwhelming sentiment--and I hear you and am doing it. The issue is more that my motivation and ambition to be a great programmer far outweigh my patience for the only two-hours-per-day hacking I've been doing. So... coping mechanisms, anyone?