i'm going to respond without trying to antagonize to many more people. i did my er rotation in a very big city with nightly shootouts. you could not get better er training than spending a few months at this place. However i will admit that the surgery department at this place is real strong, and the trauma surgeons are world renowned. As far as getting bitched at. I think anybody that's done a rotation can attest to seeing a er doc and a floor attending getting into it over whether a patient should be admitted or not. As far as doing anything technically difficult, there isn't anything a er docdoes that a senior medical student hasn't at least attempted and probably done(ie Lp,central line, suturing, delivering babies(actually a junior med student probably delivers more babies than all of the er staff at the hospital i was at), splint, intubations) As far as crna's intubating patients that the er staff couldn't get, this happen 3 times on my rotation during medical codes in which anaesthesia was called(this isn't a knock on the er doc, i realize that if anybody does enough of anything they can get good at it but still it's an observation i observed. As far as me getting a low grade in er, er is actually in academic terms a easy month for us (it's p/f and best of all no shelf exam), as far as er being a hard residency to get, .... hardly, i know a number of fmg's that matched into it, and many DO's match into it also, coupled with the fact that there are like a gillion spots, i hardly consider er like derm, or orhto, but still to show that i have some humility i'll give you that it's more competitive than my specialty, but i honestly feel that had i wanted to go into er coming from a us allopathic school i could easily have matched into it. As far as senior surgery resident running the trauma bay, it's true. Also keep in mind that a senior surgery resident is anywhere from his 5th to 7th year of training where's sometimes a er attending may be just 1 or two years out of residency making 4 or 5 years out of med school, thus when issues arrise a senior resident during is going to do things his way during a major trauma(i'm talking gsw and the like). hell i've seen the senior surger resident yell at er attendings in their 50's when things aren't going the way they should, and judgement calls when time is of utmost importance in a trauma surgery case, and the trauma attending isn't there(and this happens alot) and the senior surgical resident and the er attending are there were always made by the senior residet. Eg of this are things like during a penetrating trauma should the patient get imaging studies done or does this person go straight to the or after being stabilized. Long post but most of these things are my honest to god observations.
. I never really met a general surgeon who got bored with the field though. I've met a # who were very unhappy with either their choice, their circumstances in life, their pertners, their pay, etc... though. 
