@scottgal I've seen people successfully keep doing such stuff, really well, at the expense of "career advancement", but yeah.
On the other hand, you get more opportunities to teach/lead others to do so. Although that's not to everyone's taste I guess.
@sgf Part of it's just practical. You price yourself (either financially or skill level at stuff like architecture etc) of the 'fun' dev jobs. Staff Engineer jobs exist but they tend to be at big corps; using someone like me as a dev is EXPENSIVE when I add more value *not* writing code.