integrity?

I'm interested to hear from others on their feelings regarding professional hindsight.  For me, having been in the architectural profession for over 15 years, i'm looking back wondering how little built work there really is to reference, but how arduous and painful it has been to actually see a single project through realization/ construction.  Seriously, raising a child has in a way been more productive...It's sad, but relevancy in a field which obligates people to invest often years at a time per project, is still difficult to rationalize and has given me surprisingly little feeling of achievement in retrospect.  I appreciate the thought of architecture, but still wonder to myself whether my creative efforts might have been better applied elsewhere which could have offered a more registerable or responsive level of meaning at the end of the day. I suppose one could argue, "would you rather build 50 mediocre projects, or 1 or 2 great projects"?  I have always personally felt the latter, but as one of my former bosses used to always tell me, "good architecture takes time"...and it's exactly this that has been difficult for me to reconcile in achievements.  I was recently contemplating the words: integrity, principle, scruples, truth; and am still trying to define reason in these values.