I totally agree with you that most job descriptions don't quite match the day-to-day tasks we end up doing. It's been my experience as well.
Not just in all my salaried jobs, but even in the freelance contracts I took up.
My solution to that might seem extreme to many, but here goes: I simply stopped applying for any salaried jobs and ignored almost all the freelance gigs that came my way!
The answer to your question is that I'm not getting paid by anybody. I don't even want to get paid by anybody. Working for others on _their_ ideas is something I find downright unpleasant.
When I worked for others, many tasks seemed "menial" / "time consuming" / "boring" to my mind.
In the past, I did not realize that this unpleasantness is simply because I'm working on others ideas, instead of my own. Instead, I blamed it on the field of software engineering.
I even remember confessing to a friend that I'd started to find programming boring. That was some 4 years ago. As I said, things have totally turned around for me since then. Now when I work for myself, everything becomes a new adventure from which I learn something more.
I feel that the only way to get work satisfaction and make any impact is to explore the frontiers in different fields, work on my own, indulge my hobbies and build my own innovative products.
It's definitely a risk, but luckily I had built up a nice nest egg during my salaried and freelancing days.
If all this sounds too radical or impractical to you, then you can gently start off by offering to develop a full fledged software solution for a small business you know about via your connections (somebody mentioned veterinarians above...I agree with that kind of thinking). I'd avoid the freelancing sites though - they are a whole different set of unpleasantness.
In small business freelancing projects, you are usually the only developer doing everything, and so you will make an impact without any kind of restraints on your technical creativity. Depending on the luck and nature of that business, that impact may even be widespread in some way.
Of course, like me, eventually you may get bored of this too, since most such freelance projects too start off as CRUD type applications.
But even when implementing such boilerplate, I kept my mind open for alternate solutions that involved unconventional fields like computer vision and speech recognition.
Many business processes today involve humans in the chain only because vision, cognitive thinking, reasoning and speech do not have practical software solutions. Imagine implementing a computer vision based system that is able to keep accounts automatically from handwritten bills, without requiring users to enter details. Such problems are most definitely not solved. I'm ok if all I end up changing is making one local business richer and happier...it's still better than zero.