LLMs are plenty innovative and generate good quality code by default, and great quality code when directed well.

If you're not seeing this, at best you're probably unable to direct them or use them well.

FWIW, if you don't believe the above, I challenge you to put up a quick git repo, where you are unable to get the deserved quality out, and we can quickly show you how the same quality is available via SOTA agents, within a fraction of hand-coded time.