Is CPU/GPU Logic development the pinnacle for digital designers?

Many digital design engineers in semiconductors, defence, aerospace, iot etc. seem to have a common thread of enjoying the part of the job where it's writing RTL code. Whether it's VHDL, Verilog, SystemVerilog. The creativity aspect and satisfaction of seeing when design come to fruition within waveforms is a big part of enjoyment in work. Being able to optimize down to the last clock cycle for latency, looking for power optimizations with gating, simplifying logic to reduce area and increase performance, etc. However, grounds up digital design pure coding jobs are not as plentiful it seems vs. say software engineering coding jobs. The hardware design industry is much more mature. You are often dealing with legacy code and hacking it here/there. Also the digital design coding is a small aspect of the overall job. For ASIC designers, you have to deal with working with physical design for timing closure, validation for corner case bug fixing, and with mixed signal ICs have to work with analog designers. CPU RTL design is pretty cutthroat from what I've seen in big semiconductor giants. Competition is fierce with lots of smart people for these kinds of positions. I think it's because that is the pinnacle of the "fun stuff" for digital designers at heart. Branch prediction, cache coherency, pipelining, etc. are all fun and heavily complex digital design problems. You could go your whole career specializing in something like branch prediction or floating point.

source: Quora