I had the same experience (but after only about five years). I landed on Code Complete a couple years after devouring The Pragmatic Programmer (and requiring my developers to read it), and generally found some good ideas of varying quality buried on mountains of text. I think most of it is right, but after having some experience in the field, it seemed it was targeting all audiences at once, from the newbie to intermediate programmer but also to organizations, managers, and others related to code. It's hard to make a book that's to the point if the book lacks focus.

That said, I've still used it for my research ... although I can often find other sources that say things better, CC2 has made a good starting point for ideas on how to present ideas about code.