That sounds about right. The programming tasks most of us get are trivial, but we end up spending an egregious amount of time on integration and configuration,

That sounds about right. The programming tasks most of us get are trivial, but we end up spending an egregious amount of time on integration and configuration, so the projects still take a long time to complete, and the technical challenges we have time to deal with are rarely all that interesting. (My current position is to some extent an exception, though I'm finding that getting things done in Java with its various bloatware frameworks takes a LOT more time and effort than in most other languages/platforms, including .NET.)