Yeah, and there's an implied "and" there. One reading of what I wrote would be that "creative players" had always turned DnD into WoW, which wasn't what I was going for. I'm thinking skill challenges, utility skills, and the like. Pretty much every group I ever played with had skill challenges- we just didn't call them that, and we didn't award XP for them.
As far as the 3.5 cleric archer and why you would want to play with one, you would do it because you are the type of person who enjoys breaking games. The cleric archer would drop all his self-buffs and then kill everything in sight once per day. He was really limited only by the duration of his buffs.
Or you could cast a few spells, fall a ridiculous height to incur massive amounts of damage, and then use diplomacy to convince a god to make you a god as well.