Tangential, but I wanted to respond to this part of your statement:
Right now, I'd love to be spending 60 hrs/week programming and less time writing papers. But I bet I'll feel differently in a decade.
I found that writing in college, for classes, was not fun. It was boring, there was a lot of "write about this thing" that I really didn't know all that well. Further the topics weren't something that interested me deeply. Even worse, on the rare occasions that I did get to choose really interesting topics, the situation was depressing, I just didn't know enough to be able to make a good argument, didn't have enough perspective to understand how to find the structure of the problem and argument, and didn't really nave the background to position my statements. It was an exercise in just noting what other sources said, and putting lots of footnotes - extremely dry crap.
However, 5-6 years after college, I found myself working with a research group at a university (as a staff support programmer), and I did get to spend all my time figuring things out, coding and generally doing cool stuff (basically your 60hrs/week programming). When the time came to make a final report on my first research project, and write up an academic paper about it, was annoyed at having to do another paper. It turned out that academic papers tend to have page counts too, and I'd need to be even more careful about footnoting ideas etc.
Something surprising happened with that though - the page count turned out to be a big problem, but in a completely unexpected way: I had to cut and rewrite several times, just to make solid statement and argument small enough to fit in 8 pages! Amazingly I had gone from "how do I fill 8 pages?" to "crap, I only have 8 pages to say this!".
I think the big difference was the depth of knowledge I had, combined with my genuine interest to describe work I found interesting and satisfying. The college writing course taught me how to footnote, how to present an argument, how to build a reasonable conclusion, but had missed the part about writing being fun when one knows the material well. I went on to also enjoy some other types of writing - grants (convincing someone you have a good idea and getting them to fund it) and position papers (aka white papers, on ideas that our group thought would be good directions for further research.
I'm mentioning this because even if you don't like the writing now, I'd suggest not letting it poison your future views of it - the experience can be rewarding under the right circumstances. Hopefully it will inspire you a bit to get through your current papers a bit easier :)