&gt; &quot;but if you miss the basis, your creativity will suck, full stop&quot;<p>I couldn&#x27;t disagree more. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with learning from the past, it&#x27;s a useful source of inspiration and ideas, but creativity is the &#x27;art of the possible&#x27;, in other words the only limits are those which set what is possible. If all new creations need to live up to the &#x27;greatest hits&#x27; of the past then creative exploration is going to be severely limited. There is nothing wrong with making a bad tasting dish if you can learn from it.