You're underestimating the amount of fun that can be had carving 162,329 table legs. Suppose you have a theory of table legs, that you believe can describe the physics of table legs completely, and suddenly, on the 89,402nd table leg, something unexpected happens. Maybe the piece of wood has icky things crawling in it. Your theory of table legs says nothing about icky things or crawling. You have to rethink everything you know about table legs, trying to make the icky things fit in with the table leg theory; your new theory will make predictions, and those predictions will have to be tested. Maybe there's only a 1 in 162,329 chance, as far as you know, of deriving a result that's at all useful, but at least that's a chance.
"Pretending that the new way doesn't exist, and learning the old-fashioned way, will not be Fun because there's not true victory."
What's a true victory, then? Making something that's kind of like a mixture of yourself and someone else? I'm not sure reproduction is more of a "natural" challenge than making 200,000 table legs; it just happens to be the one that evolution selects for.