You might also think of it a bit like poetry: creativity emerging from the process of working within formal constraints. By asking how you can represent something familiar in a specially structured way, you can learn both about that structure and the thing you're trying to unite with it. Occasionally, you'll even create something beautiful or powerful, as well.

Maybe in that sense there's an "artificial" challenge involved, but it's artificial in the sense of being deliberate rather than merely arbitrary or absurd.