Ignoring the technical side of photography like a red-headed bastard stepchild and focusing solely on the artistic/creative aspects of photography sounds romantic, and appeals to a certain ethos that denigrates the pursuit of technical skill as merely being a distracting deviation from the One True Path To Photographic Nirvana. But the reality is that this ethos is bullshit. The truth is that you can't rely on auto-everything cameras to flawlessly handle the technical stuff for you in every situation. Nowadays, in addition to automatic focus, ISO, shutter speed, and aperture, cameras have face detection and even smile detection that can with varying degrees of competence detect faces in the viewfinder, lock focus on the faces, and delay the shutter release until the faces are all smiling. A creatively endowed technical neophyte relying on such a camera may well produce competent work in many situations, until he is called upon to photograph a funeral, political protest or large-scale disaster, where smiles are unlikely to be the order of the day. Such a photographer would not have captured this image:

As the camera waits for the firefighter to smile, this moment would have passed the photographer by, unrecorded.
There is a minimum degree of technical competence that any aspiring photographer must master to avoid this sort of problem, starting with RTFM, RTFM, RTFM. Yeah, it sucks to have to wade through hundreds of pages of manuals, often written in poorly mistranslated Engrish, to figure out what the difference between IS Mode 1 and 2 is and the difference between spot, center-weighted average, and matrix metering. But such "technical trivia" can mean the difference between getting the shot and not getting the shot in some circumstances. Knowing how to use fill flash to deal with backlighting or how to
assign autofocus to buttons other than the shutter release opens up a lot of creative possibilities, but the instructions for configuring the necessary settings are often buried deep in the manual. And then there's Photoshop and the many books that supplement its voluminous manual and help files, RAW conversion, and color management. Not having a basic mastery of these things can cause severe frustration, especially color management. Being ignorant of the arcana of monitor calibration and profiling, the signs and symptoms of double-profiling, and the proper use of the various RGB color spaces can cause the technical neophyte endless frustration, no matter how creative his vision.
The creative and the technical sides of photography are symbiotic partners in the process of creating great work, not sworn enemies competing for time and attention. Pursuing either to the exclusion of the other will negatively affect one's work. The technerd who seriously thinks that upgrading from a 5D-II to a 1Ds-III will resolve the creative shortcomings of his work is just as much a fool as the
artiste who refuses to soil the artistic integrity of his work by bothering to learn the difference between P mode and M mode.