Oh, 100% man, me too. I've come to realize two things, first, like you say, the payoff to me is expression and creation. The second is as much as I'd like to write epic stuff, I naturally tend to create hooks and acerbic/nihilistic lyrics, and I'm best when I do that. When I try to force other things it's really apparent, at least to me. Also I guess a third thing is I need a live band to play worth a shit. The interplay is critical to me, and also doing the engineering myself as I'm trying to track really throws me off.
It's kind of wild really, because when I started playing guitar, I quickly joined a band we named after the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd ( I am sure I've told this story before), who along with Led Zeppelin, made up the Holy Trinity. And I'd even say that Floyd and Zep were the ones we geeked out on the most, though we played more Stones songs in our set by a long shot. I actually don't recall playing a Floyd song live with that group to be honest which is strange as we were crazy into them. There was talk of doing Dogs but I don't think we ever did it. But one asterisk is I've always had that sort of duality with classic rock and modern. My best friend from Junior High on started a band, and was totally a contemporary style (both of these bands, mine and his were originals bands, not cover groups), and they went for about a year as a trio before the really wanted a second guitarist, and tried a few dudes out to not a lot of success. After awhile the rhythm section were leaning on my buddy to get me to come over, and he was resistant for a couple reasons, most of which is not asking me to leave my other band. The other group kind of imploded right about that time though so the rest is history as they say. We ended up playing through most of us going to college, cutting a couple EPs, and all that mess. Our songs were definitely a bit more involved than what my actual songwriting voice was, they tended to my buddies tastes somewhat as he was the main writer, and honestly I was still finding it at that point anyway. So somehow through all that, I stumbled onto Social Distortion, and it was like a bolt of lightning in terms of me knowing, A) what I wanted to say and B) the fact I was way more into songwriting than playing an instrument. I had listened to some punk rock before (I was actually a punk rocker for Halloween in 4th grade somehow, this is in the 80's), I remember hearing Pennywise's first album in like '91 maybe? but when I first heard Social D it all changed and I had a clarity that was not there before.
So this post clearly got away from me, wow, but I guess the short short version is I love to geek out on Gilmour stuff, and my style of leads is completely a derivative of his, but the songwriting stuff is 3 chords and the truth all the way.