You're pretty much suggesting that using strong feedback to force culture to stay within a tiny area of the total possible cultural phase space is just as interesting as allowing chaotic exploration of the entire space.
It's not just an argument against creativity, it's an argument against invention in general.
>My issue is that none of those examples are backed by any evidence that they are not doing a decent job of finding a global maximum.
That's the thing about global maxima - you only know that you've found a global maximum if you've explored the entire space.
Otherwise you've just stumbled across a local attractor, and you're stuck in a loop around it.
This isn't even a good analogy, because cultural attractors are contingent, and they vary over time. They're also unpredictable.
The reason they capture attention isn't because they're maxima in some analytic sense. They become found maxima because they summarise some aspect of human experience, so they appeal to a lot of people at once.
The spectrum of possible maxima is mysterious and not understood, which is how you get - say - Harry Potter coming out of nowhere and captivating a generation.
Culture is music, not a sine wave. You don't just want a single signal - you want a mix of related-but-different signals running all the time.
