Any old sod can be creative and I'd argue that most of us here are probably particularly skilled at at. But we (well, we might) don't have editors and publishers and playtesters to ensure that what we are creating is particularly refined. We might have the raw information and a general idea of how we want to present it, but until we actually go out and do that we don't have a nice and refined approach.
This, frankly, is the only reason I assume that people actually buy modules, adventures and settings, because not only do they provide interesting information, but they also provide cohesive thematic elements that bring all of these bits of information together in a very particularly appealing way.
I can only speak for myself. I use adventures because they have situations that I wouldn't have thought of myself. For instance, I wouldn't have though of The Crimson Bull scenario, which
<spoiler alert> involves a bull that has turned crimson because an evil spirit has been trapped in it, and which has a cord made of hair tied around it which must remain in the grip of a righteous person at all times if the spirit is not to escape.
Others can judge how creative I am; but that's not something I would come up with on my own.
The other things that I like from modules, settings etc is maps, names and/or stats.
I like the presentation to be useful, in the sense that the copy-editing is sound, the maps clear, and the prose readable. But I'm not looking at the module to be impressed by its presentation or flair (and I find a lot of RPG material, especially from WotC, to be over-written). I want stuff that I can use.
Er, no. These things are quite frankly, not atmosphere. Those are all things you are doing in response to the situation you find yourself in, which is not atmosphere. Not even close. I'm actually a little befuddled how you can even argue that. The atmosphere is the "pervading tone or mood", in this case, of the room. Your decisions are a reaction to the atmosphere of the room.
The furniture unsettles you, so you uncover it. The mirror weirds you out, so you smash it. The open window is both a means of escape and saftey, but also a venue for attack and danger.
Your choices there are reactions to the atmosphere I established. Yes, you would have reactions to those objects without the atmosphere injection, but would those reactions be ones of fear? Which is the guiding theme of Curse of Strahd (and its predecessors).
When I play a RPG I am not going to experience fear because of the referee's narration. That's a response appropriate to a book or film, perhaps, but not a RPG.
In a RPG, my emotional responses are generated by the context for, and consequences of, the actions I declare for my character. I'll give an example to explain what I mean. In the first session of BW that I played as a player (rather than GM), my PC and his companion were investigating an abandoned farmstead. As we were doing this, orcs attacked. What generated my emotional response to the orcs was not the GM's narration of them: it was the fact that I knew - given my knowledge of the game mechanics and the character's stats - that my companion was in danger from the orcs, and that it might be hard for me to both protect here
and make sure the orcs didn't get to my horse, which was tethered to a post outside the farm house. Or to put it another way, it was my knowledge of the possibilities implicit in the circumstances of play that generated an emotional response.
This is why I pointed to those same possibilities in my comment on the Strahd room.
This is also why, upthread, I said that in my view an emphasis on the quality of
narration tends to shift the focus of RPGing from its strongest aspect (ie engaging the players in the fiction by pushing them to make decisions in circumstances pregnant with possibility) to its weakest aspect (ie hoping that the authorship of a D&D module writer and the oratory of a GM will provide a narrative experience comparable to a quality book or film).
