I will tell you a little story... The day I got into college, I realized one thing - if you wish to take the easy way out, just do what everyone was doing.
Being in CS, people started doing Competitive coding because of two reasons:
Note: Competitive Programming is just opposite of development.
I started doing CP but then I soon realized that I don't really like it. It ruined my good coding habits and the very thought of coding without a motive wrecks my will to code. Then I stepped into dev and I never looked back. Life has been difficult for me since but I have made my name in my college because I went upstream, I took the risk of trying something different. I eventually ended up hating my batchmates and openly criticizing CP in every dev workshop I took. I mean, CP is good as a way to spend you weekend sharpening your problem solving skill but as a passion to follow, it is bullshit. If you don't have a purpose to code, you better keep your hands off the keyboard.
Dev has given me the gift of putting my creativity and imagination to the test to create things that I myself can use to make my life easy. I write code as if it were my poem. I spend days refactoring code just because it was not looking good! I have the level of dedication towards the code I write.
So hell yeah! Thumbs up for development....