I would like to disagree here - in my experience, maintenance coding means working on pieces within existing overall architecture. And if that arhitecture sucks

I would like to disagree here - in my experience, maintenance coding means working on pieces within existing overall architecture. And if that arhitecture sucks, well, too bad - not often you can allot the time necessary for proper fixes when working on what appear to be minor bugs. And when you are writing workarounds instead of the beautiful code floating in your mind, it's a long way from meditation. The challenge in decelopment coding is "how can we make this happen?" - both coding skill and creativity involved. The challenge in maintenance coding is "how can we get this to work without breaking everything else" - lot less creativity, lot more patching of a leaky boat.