Funny that you mention transparent tiles. Apps that aren't transparent annoy me so much. They never make it to my home screen. I have one excluded from this rule, which is ProShot but that hides in a folder with other transparent tiles so it never appears on the folder tile. Live tiles really are, I couldn't agree with you more.
The only 4 I use are weather, realarm (for next alarm), calendar and battery (since MS decided to remove the option of having a % of battery left when pinning battery saver).
When I first switched to WP8, I adored live tiles. It offered me something that iOS of the day didn't, and its contemporary Android only did to a certain degree (that something was "widgets" everywhere instead of solid icons everywhere). What also helped their cause was that before the update to WP8.1, all the quick actions I needed would need an app that would generate a tile (like wifi or battery).
Today, the opaque tiles are a chore to deal with since they get in the way of the background, which I absolutely craved when the only form of customizing my Lumia was putting a (single) color for all the tiles. In a way, some functionality was lost when the only opaque tiles I use are shrunk to the smallest tile size (aside from the photos tile) and relegated to one corner of the screen. But since most of my tiles pre-8.1 were replaced with the notifications area, it wasn't missed.
As far as boredom. I have been using computers for quite the while, and whenever I could customize, I would. Especially on the most personal computer at the time. Back when I was younger it entailed recoloring the DOS prompt text and line background. On 3.1, it meant switching to the hotdog stand color scheme. When I first used Win7, the idea of rotating backgrounds (plus the fact that it looked like Vista and acted like XP... sound familiar?) was for all intents my favorite part.
Now that my most personal of computers is the phone, it is the recipient of most of this type of attention, but no one is spared. As you mentioned in an earlier post, "it's easier to feel tired of looking at whatever thing much faster than usual," the more you look at it.