To clarify, I work embedded systems for aerospace so it's a very different world than most devs exist in. The customer is asking for something defined in a legal contract with the details spelled out for the most part. The issue is the industry is inhabited by dinosaurs so the older I get, the more I realize that *nobody* knows what they're doing. Everyone is just trying to maintain their silo so they can keep getting a paycheck. As such everyone is still using c/gcc/svn/eclipse/windows/vxworks and if you even think about changing any one of those things in the slightest you'll be inviting a firestorm of pushback as it threatens to break long established and scripted personal workflows that only the individual understands: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Corporate almost always wants faster/better/more agile/higher reuse and you see that in postings/interviews but the PMs/Principle types always dig a moat to prevent anything from moving down to Seniors and lower.

You can't be a one man band, but if the organisation supports it, you can achieve both. In my experience, it doesn't need to be a trade off. We can get close to the users and program to your hearts content. We need the right company and environment to want to invest in that for us. There's a great loop we can get into by doing things like offering demos of new features to clients weekly or bi-weekly. What I've seen happen is that we don't need to code as much because we know the specific problems that need to be solved, rather than loads of guesswork and trying to write blanket solutions for misunderstood problems.