Meh! Veteran programmers don't necessarily do those things either. I don't tend to bother with the first two, and I know plenty of other programmers who do no better. With that in mine, what hope do newbies have?
Never have I heard more truthful words spoken. Down with the evil! Unfortunately design is also a necessary evil, particularly with collaborative projects. Same goes for documentation.
Like Dj_Jestar, I'm a full-time developer so don't tend to do much out-of-hours programming (I have a several-year-old personal project that is working but really needs a rewrite and I just haven't got around to moving forward yet - if any of you code monkeys get bored I might come do some recruiting

).
I'm happy to advise though - experienced server, forum, Subversion etc. admin with a bit of open source in me too. No games programming experience whatsoever though.
I'd recommend avoiding Python. It's not a particularly newbie-friendly language. C++/C# or Java make much more sense to me.