For me personally, when I had a lot less experience the attraction was mostly a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction that I could make a machine do exactly what I envisioned in my mind. As I accumulated more and more professional experience, the source of my satisfaction became increasingly distant from the actual code itself, e.g. analyzing a business need and identifying a technical solution that met it became more satisfying than writing the actual code itself. 10+ years down the line now and in my current role I very rarely write any production code. To the extent that I miss it, it's probably mostly down to nostalgia. I typically get more satisfaction from working with strategic technical problems, enabling developers, doing high-level designs, liaising between tech and other departments, etc.
So TL;DR - yes, it's perfectly normal to find non-coding software development activities more gratifying :)