Well put. This notion of "ignorabimus"[1] which he opposes would seem to have gathered a great deal of evidence in the meantime. What I wish was more widely understood today was the cost of attempting to use models that are effective in the natural sciences in domains where they seem to be consistently ineffective. The replication crisis [2] , where in some cases less than 40% of key studies in psychology and the social sciences could be replicated, is often chalked up to improper statistical analysis or lack of integrity on the part of the authors. But it seems more likely to be the result of relentlessly applying linear mathematics and statistical methods to a domain where things simply do not work the way they works in physics or the natural sciences. To be sure - there is some baby in that bathwater, but the social "sciences" have thus far failed to articulate the domains that are baby and the domains that are bathwater. The amount of human effort and time that is wasted because "We must know" and "We will know" - trying to fit a square peg in a round hole - seems immense.
I think your argument in quotes is a good one. :) Following a set of pre-defined instructions is not a creative act. It's not bad to build a puzzle, but I would argue that it's not nearly as meaningful of an experience as painting - or any other creative activity for that matter.
I worked on Scratch for 6 years, in charge of the online community. We often encountered adult programmers who were surprised by what was possible in terms of complex projects with Scratch. There was usually a great deal of concern about how the transition to "real" (text based) programming languages would go. It always seemed strange to me, this attachment to text based programming as the only "true" "real" etc. programming. At any rate, I saw quite a few kids make that transition without any problems. I've still never seen any systematic evidence that moving from tiles to text presents significant difficulty, and yet so much energy is devoted to "solving" this problem.