3rd year resident here.
I would imagine that most physicians who see patients to work up a symptoms are going to have countless examples of being able to make a cool diagnosis with physical exam, procedures/scopes, or imaging. Probably the better question is, what fields are less likely to be doing that sort of stuff--I would imagine that a lot of radiation oncology is having someone referred to you with a diagnosed and staged cancer, and you're just deciding whether or not to treat, and what protocol to use if you do (I'm no rad/onc though, so I could be wrong). In any specialty, you will see a ton of bread and butter stuff, but also get your occasional zebra. I can remember patients where we diagnosed Wegener's from the nose, we had laryngeal tuberculosis not too long ago, diagnoses of ALS and Parkinsons in laryngology clinic, and endocrine tumor in the floor of mouth that had led to osteoporosis and pathologic fractures in a middle-aged man. As long as you see lots of patients you will do those things, and if you don't put your "subspecialist blinders" on too tightly, you will make diagnoses that the primary team missed. What you're enjoying now, is definitely found in ENT, but also found in many other fields as well.
In terms of surgery, of course it works for a lot of them. Some are less happy--often the cancer patients are grateful, but sometimes they're understandably upset with a lot of things given their burden, or some of the facial trauma patients are unhappy despite you putting their face back together for them. Happy patients after surgery mostly comes down to selecting the right patient. If you do sinus surgery on every patient that comes to your clinic with "sinusitis" or sinus pain, you will be left with a lot of people that are unhappy, because chronic sinus inflammation is not the cause of most sinus pain. So, if you do a lot of surgery and your patients aren't happy, the problem is not the specialty you chose...
Just my two cents.
