Ask a guitarist what makes their tone and they'll usually point at one thing: the guitar, the amp, that one pedal. The honest answer is less satisfying. Tone is a pipeline, and like any pipeline the order of the stages matters as much as the stages themselves.
Order is the whole game
Run an overdrive into a fuzz and you get one thing; swap them and you get a completely different, often unusable, sound. Put modulation before distortion and it smears; put it after and it shimmers. The components didn't change. The graph did.
guitar → tuner → wah → overdrive → distortion
→ [amp loop] → chorus → delay → reverb → outDynamic and gain effects up front, where the signal is rawest. Time and space effects at the end, where you want them to sit on top of everything rather than get crushed by the gain stage. That single principle explains most of a good board.
It's the same instinct as good software
This is going to sound like a stretch, but the thing I enjoy about a signal chain is exactly the thing I enjoy about architecture: you're composing small, well-understood transforms into an order that produces an emergent result. Each pedal is a pure function. The board is a pipeline. The bugs are the same kind of bug: a stage in the wrong place, a gain structure that clips where you didn't want it to, a feedback loop you didn't intend.
The difference is the feedback time. A bad refactor takes a sprint to feel. A bad pedal order takes about four seconds: you hear it, you move the box, you hear it again. That tight loop is why I find it relaxing. It's debugging with your ears, and the build is always green when it sounds right.