Wow, that's deep, man.
Anyway, I always decide on a new style of build every world I make. Currently, I'm living inside a cave, with little to no modifications, but I soon plan to turn it into a mine, so I'll use a lot of wood. On other worlds (namely, the single chunk challenge, which ended up with a giant mage tower made out of blood-stained fitted bricks, quarried fitted bricks and frost fitted bricks, the ravine base, which used a lot of drawbridges - actually quite fun, and CC is amazing at making a cheaper PRC - and the spaceship repair station), I always try to build something with a theme or a challenge. The ravine ended up like a dwarven base, the single chunk, a square tower, the spaceship repair station was like a mix between the Enterprise, the TARDIS and the Death Star, just square. The craziest part? They were all essentially boxes. There's no need to be overly fancy. The single chunk ended up being a challenge material-wise. The repair station was hard to build. But they were better than most of my non-box bases.
The problem is not it being a box.
Is what you do with that box.
And creativity can turn a box into something exciting.
After all, didn't you toy around with a box of something (just the box) when you were a kid?