Lego is still quite amazing but not quite as cool as it used to be. I suppose the various boxes were always meant to be such that you could build that one really cool building/vehicle/etc. with it. Sometimes with a predesigned variation, too. But today it seems that the purpose of most boxes is to do only that - and then, what, put the object into a display case? Or, more likely, play with it for a while and then for…
We couldn't afford the expensive sets, so I was always doing a little bit of the calculus about what interesting parts I could see on the box, whether they were in a color that I favored (if you want to build something mono- or dichromatic you have to have a lot of pieces in one or two colors), the state of disrepair of my minifigs (the helmet chinstraps back then were always breaking) etc.
It wasn't the first choice usually, but often once I'd narrowed it down to a couple in my price range, it mattered.
As an adult I happened upon a lego expo a couple times in a community center, and one that stuck out to me relates to your story. For a while there were sets with very long, spindly, curved pieces that always annoyed me, but the centerpiece of this exposition was a suspension bridge of Lego about ten feet long. The trusses that held the road bed were made almost entirely by chaining together those curved, spindly bits. God knows where he got that many of them and all the same color. And how much that cost.