I've glanced at design patterns, but like most programming books, it bored me to death.

To me it reads like "now that you know how to hold this clumsy 90s OOP hammer, here's how to swing it". That's a far cry from architecting systems, and not a particularly motivating read for someone who's really not into that flavor of OOP (or much OOP at all).

Those are all intermediate/improver kind of books, though. They contain a lot of useful material, and many programmers who haven't studied those subjects would benefit from doing so. However, the ideas would (should) be familiar to any professional programmer with more than a few years of experience. The challenge is where you go after that to continue developing your skills and broadening your experience for the next 5 or 10 or 20 years, rather than becoming the "eternal novice" who is proficient with the basic tools but unaware of more advanced idioms or more strategic issues that would help them to produce much better work.