My manager and I were having a discussion about this yesterday and I wanted to bring it up to a larger sounding board to see what more developers have to say about it:

Do you find algorithms and puzzling problem solving in code to be far more interesting and satisfying to solve than strange and ambiguous issues with code that "should work" but doesn't? (Example: Project sends true response to SOAP message from local Development environment, but once you move it to the Test server it returns an ambiguous error message)

We ended up solving the issue with the SOAP request by the way - 8 hours in we realized we were missing the server's IP in our Salesforce network whitelist.