I think my career has entered a vicious circle which I would like to exit: I am best at what I hate most. And because I am good at that, I always receive that kind of assignments, and I do them as expected or even better. Which makes me more of an expert and brings me more similar tasks.

My "expertise" is what (I think) every programmer hates: legacy systems. I can very quickly learn systems, and modify them, migrate them, extract web services from them whatever (without breaking them). Never to develop more functionality or to solve interesting or original problems. Just have that work with Java 1.4, or convert it into a rest-full service or support oracle too.

I feel (and I am told) that I am highly regarded and very helpful to my company. But I hate what I do.

What would you do in my place?