The pain in the arse which is debugging is what motivated me to, as my career progressed, improve my coding, improve my software design, improve my systems design, even improved my software development process and standards and eventually that even extended to getting those I worked with to also improving those things as I sometimes ended up having to debug their bugs.

Debugging definitelly makes better techies, IMHO, mainly because of the lengths people will go to in order the avoid having to do it.