I'd enthusiastically accept your response that the most important human trait is, "free, self-directed creativity," if you hadn't immediately discounted it by claiming it is "at odds with all things wild."

There is nothing unnatural about our self-directed creativity. It is no more unnatural than all the other survival enhancing improvements that life has made. The means of making these improvements has itself evolved. We speculate it began by simple, undirected random mixing of the building blocks of life until a survival advantage emerged and became visible as an identifiable step forward. We humans are the result of several such identifiable steps, the step of sexual mixing, etc. every one of these steps we now call "natural." Why then should the most recent step forward be "at odds with all things wild?" We remain a part of nature. We literally cannot become "unnatural." So there is nothing to lament, no casting out of any garden, no "but" to degrade the wonder of being human.

It's rather like the quote, "there is nothing to fear but fear itself," except this time "there are no arguments for discounting human capabilities except for those supplied by defective philosophies." This doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely, but unlike Kennedy's missive, which, after all, is not always true, this one is always and durably true.

I suppose that in your formulation, "free, self-directed creativity," one would need to carefully define "free, self-directed." Determinists need not apply. And those bitter determinists who claim the only alternative to determinism is mysticism can just continue to make their cognitively empty and meaningless noises, for on their own premise their words are insignificant, being just random residual noises echoing down through the ages from the big bang.

Why, I want to know, can no one just embrace the fact that human beings are wonderful amazing creatures and that it is an endlessly exciting and positive thing to be a living human being?

This will be an ever more significant question as we take the next evolutionary step - arguably the biggest step yet, for we are now about to take our actual genetic code away from the mechanism of natural selection and place it under our own deliberate and reasoned control.

And even this will be perfectly natural - though there will be a long and furious battle about it due entirely to bad philosophy.