We have all experienced feelings such as yours before. At this very moment, I am angered with the level of obfuscation that seems to have arisen in my networking codebase. So, I am removing it. From the ground up. A good point was raised earlier that one should try and refactor wherever possible. Yet, coming at this from the other direction, sometimes it is best to start again. I just purchased a book on software design. Normally, I would not have considered such a step, yet what limits my creativity the most is my constant fear of implementing something the "wrong" way. But, in many cases there isn't a wrong way. Get something working, learn from it, and if needs be redesign it with the newer functionality in mind. The point about a "buddy". I think it is one of, if not the MOST important point.

It's so hard to find someone.

I have an artist (which hopefully wont bail)

Ah yes one of my biggest problems.

When I get bored I write DOS games. They may seem like a horrible waste of time being so out of date and all that. However when you write one of them you learn a lot about the hardware you're using and there great fun. You don't have to worry about your code getting to complex because a really complicated program wont run on most dos machines. They are usually quick and almost every line is important and you learn a ton about optimization. So next time you feel like this I would get started on one of those and like me you will wish modern programming was like this.

Well hopefully he wont, but I dunno. Lately I've been frustrated in the way I'm doing things in my current game. I've got all boiler plate code, and a screen showing up currently. Nothing else has been done really. Hopefully I'll have something on the screen by the end of the week.