If you ("one") can't be creative with what's there now, are you really that creative?
I don't whether to be insulted or just laugh at your naivety on that line.
Just be a user for a moment, rather than an Adobe evangelist.
It's not just about creativity, it's about ease of use, and those often go hand in hand. Just dragging a photo onto a blank page, then sizing and positioning it with the usual grab handles (like the crop function) is simple and intuitive, as is just drawing a text box that you can resize and position to suit a layout. It doesn't involve searching through lists of layouts, or complex adjustments of sliders to position things where you want them(assuming you can at all).
Using external software is just nonsense in this context. Shall we discuss this idea that building custom layouts can be done via notepad ? ie having to edit code ?
please this is the 21st century, we shouldn't expect users to be coding where they want their photos on a page.
Apple offer it Aperture, Blurb offer it in Booksmart, Adobe
will catch up, maybe in a while, but it's looking silly to have omitted it from the beginning.