There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev. The field is changing at a fantastic pace, and there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with. Its wide open. If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong.
> There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev.
Name three that your boss will allow you to work on.
> there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with
Name three that your boss will allow you to work on.
> If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong.
Or maybe that's his boss doing it wrong: like, "This form is ugly on our HR people's computer. Please fix it by next week." Of course, the stuff is badly written, badly documented, and have to work with 5 different browsers, including IE6. The fastest way to please your boss is the JS hack. The fastest way to displease your boss is to suggest that, maybe, IE6 is a teeny bit outdated.
If you have a bad boss, find a new boss. You could just do the right thing, and if your boss has a problem with it, you're fired. Problem solved.
Of course, this assumes that it actually is your boss who's wrong, and you're not just ignorant of the market realities that your business operates in. If you want to avoid that JS hack and drop support for IE6, you better have numbers that show that it's a negligible part of your revenues. And if you do have those numbers, it will be much easier to convince your boss.
(True story: I was working on Google's visual redesign of 2010. As a team, we all estimated that supporting IE6 would double the development cost and add a minimum of 3 months to the schedule. We took this info - along with numbers for IE6 market share - to our managers, who took this to their managers, until it reached the executive level. The verdict: we didn't have to support IE6. This was the first version of Google Search that dropped support for it - Docs had dropped support a couple months earlier - and started the tidal wave of sites not supporting IE6.)
Your boss may not let you work on it but there's no reason to not work on it outside the job for 5-10 hours a week, just for kicks. Those kicks might be enough to keep the day job more bearable.
If at the end of the day, putting in 5-10 hours a week extra out of your own time for it is considered too much, then accept that you also see your work as just a job.
The OP himself reckons the hobby is fine. It's the job that sucks. Sure, you can take some quality programming time outside your job, and the OP does exactly that, but your day job is still taking a huge chunk off your life.
When a job sucks, the solution hardly lies in what you do in your spare time. First, I would try to improve the job, or enjoy it, or quit it, or annihilate it (we're programmers, annihilating jobs is what we do). And if all that fails or otherwise isn't worth my efforts, then I will give up and learn to love my spare time.
When someone is complaining their job sucks, my first reflex isn't to tell them to man up, cheer up, or give up. It's not helping. instead, I ask myself what could be done about it.
Work normal hours for your job then anything extra pushing your skills in areas you find interesting. This can be on tangentially related work tasks or research or skills.
If you find your interests lead away from your job, then that is a path to skilling up for a more appropriate job.
If you think it sucks you have to work so long and hard to find and/or get those interesting jobs it does .
But it's because other people are willing to do this and will get the interesting jobs leaving the boring ones to those that don't.
Learning a useful tool at home related to work pays off.
For a web front end task job that doesn't have JQuery 5-10 hours in it could save so many hours at work after introduction you may look like a hero and win you more paid at work research time.
Prove you are worth research time to your employer.
