With creative works you are necessarily adapting and building on previous work. What first principles as a goal does is allow you the possibility of making new

With creative works you are necessarily adapting and building on previous work. What first principles as a goal does is allow you the possibility of making new mistakes...and while that's good in a research sense, for most practical design you want to restrict the deep experiments to a certain focus area and loosely copy the rest so that you have a stable framework to test those ideas with. Shooting off in an all-original direction basically ensures you will make mistakes.