This is the root of so much of our software quality problem. “I want to work on something shiny” outweighs “I have pride in this software and want to keep it healthy.”

Personally I love working on legacy software, I actually dislike greenfield projects, but even in the context of legacy software and system maintenance, backporting fixes would still not rate highly or provide much in the way of interesting work for me.

I'd say there's enough software developers that enjoy doing the latter. It's mostly the external motivation (both in community standing and in payments) that push people to shiny new things.