I have to assume that you realize that this is all subjective.
What you are describing sounds like the subjective experience of what you feel when you work in the traditional establishment. You feel unstimulated, but that's a product of your personality and your immediate environment.
To put it another way... whether an environment is "interesting" depends on whether someone is interested.
Choosing to leave a large organization gives you some freedoms and takes away others. It sounds like you value the freedoms that you get outside large organizations, and you have only harsh words for people who feel otherwise.
Just to put this in concrete terms... let's say you are curious about compilers, or memory allocators, or network flow control algorithms. It tends to be only large organizations that will pay you to work on those things, and in order to my curiosity about those things, I would want to rub elbows with experts in those subjects. Those opportunities exist at the largest tech companies and in academia (and my experience is that academia is no less bureaucratic).
For me, sometimes, navigating broken bureaucracies is a price that I pay to work on some really fascinating problems. The broken bureaucracy itself is a fascinating problem.
What you are describing sounds like the subjective experience of what you feel when you work in the traditional establishment. You feel unstimulated, but that's a product of your personality and your immediate environment.
To put it another way... whether an environment is "interesting" depends on whether someone is interested.
Choosing to leave a large organization gives you some freedoms and takes away others. It sounds like you value the freedoms that you get outside large organizations, and you have only harsh words for people who feel otherwise.
Just to put this in concrete terms... let's say you are curious about compilers, or memory allocators, or network flow control algorithms. It tends to be only large organizations that will pay you to work on those things, and in order to my curiosity about those things, I would want to rub elbows with experts in those subjects. Those opportunities exist at the largest tech companies and in academia (and my experience is that academia is no less bureaucratic).
For me, sometimes, navigating broken bureaucracies is a price that I pay to work on some really fascinating problems. The broken bureaucracy itself is a fascinating problem.