I think the solving complex problems part is not a real factor. Every business has its problems, and most of them are non-trivial (otherwise, everyone would be in the business), so while it's maybe your job to convince someone that your problems are worth solving, it's not necessary to prove that your problems are hard.
I also think most hackers get less joy out of pushing technology to the limits and more joy out of doing something well. Sometimes those may coincide (scaling Rails, for example) but often times pushing technology to the limits means you're not solving the problem elegantly/economically. Take Google for example; they've got the most powerful distributed computation system in the world, but it's done on some really crappy PC's.