Thanks Hywel, some good stuff in there I think.
I think a big part of it is that quite a lot of things, including many that are not necessarily immediately obvious as 'fun' or 'cool' or 'interesting', can become interesting if you stick at them long enough. I don't mean that anyone who studies inheritance tax law for long enough suddenly has this Zen-like epiphany of awesomeness, more that it can be fun to be good at something but to get to this stage, you have to do the drudgey stuff first. Like how it can be pleasurable to drive a car on a country road (assuming you have the good fortune to find a stretch with no other traffic on it, which is a rare thing in southern England in 2016, but anyway) but long before you get to that level of competence, you have to complete the usually not-terribly-fun stuff of learning how to navigate roundabouts and parallel-park and all that bollocks.
I've had little glimpses of this in programming before so maybe there'll be a greater pay-off if I stick with the Python. Let's see.