Man, we do both in my house. When I was a kid, I mostly had pile-of-legos and not sets. I did very little following of the directions. My kids *love* just me

Man, we do both in my house. When I was a kid, I mostly had pile-of-legos and not sets. I did very little following of the directions. My kids *love* just messing around with piles of LEGO (and even Duplo) and making their own creations: mostly weapons. And they also love working on the 3000 piece crazy-complicated sets, presorting everything and figuring out where to put each piece step by step. There's a whole lot of creative, unstructured play (not really heading towards mastery of sculpting or design), and a whole lot of concentrating replicating a model. It'd be kind of neat if they'd decide to do something inbetween.