I definitely see your point of view regarding all the efforts in the community to make the next shiny thing. It's very prevalent on the front page of HN all the time. I can't tell if it's representative of the culture as a whole or just those who are frequent posters of HN.

In any case, I think that you'd have a lot in common with David Heinemeier Hansson. You can see in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBfVxBj61z0 and a lot of his blogs that he approaches things in a much more realistic down to earth manner than many other engineers out there. I think that if that's what you want, then it's all a matter of finding the right company that thinks the same way about using technology to solve real problems.