Yes, pragmatic and practical are directly opposed to clever or creative thinking. The trick is to know when to apply each one, and to apply enough of the former to have time for the latter.
In every application or machine I write code for, there is typically one, sometimes two, really interesting problems. But there are innumerable bits of boring business logic to implement along the way. You sometimes need to be willing to have a method copy-pasted with trivial changes in three places (which bothers me sometimes, thinking it would be better to have one method with a parameter to select between the variations) in order to have time to develop an extensible, adjustable, clever solution somewhere else.
In every application or machine I write code for, there is typically one, sometimes two, really interesting problems. But there are innumerable bits of boring business logic to implement along the way. You sometimes need to be willing to have a method copy-pasted with trivial changes in three places (which bothers me sometimes, thinking it would be better to have one method with a parameter to select between the variations) in order to have time to develop an extensible, adjustable, clever solution somewhere else.