I think a nice looking image heavily manipulated digitally lacks true creativity because the work is done by a computer software.
I disagree, and it has to do with the notion that I think you're confusing the concepts of art and skill. While they are related, they are conceptually distinct. Art, as far as I'm concerned, is about making something that moves people, that instills a message, emotion or notion on the onlooker. It tends to involve things like conceptual thinking, a good dose of intuition and often a lot of experimentation on behalf of the artist. What it does not, however, require is suffering. I think this is a misunderstood aspect of art and probably stems from the archetypical view that we have of the 'starving artist' that has to deal with hardship and massive challenges. In that sense, there is nothing wrong with using efficient digital tools to create a work of art. Indeed, much of the visual arts these days revolves around such tools. I wouldn't want to go as far as to disqualify because all of them are supposedly 'cheap creativity' or that relatively rapid tools were used to get to a certain end result! I really think that's a bit of a misconception on your behalf.
In this sense, you can also argue that skill is only to some extent necessary to create art. You only need to have the skill necessary to get the message across effectively. Skill in itself doesn't make art, and it's just a vehicle or tool to accomplish something. As a result, staring yourself blind on skill, and employing the most skillful approach to get something done, doesn't create art. In other words: making the same end result digitally as with film wouldn't make either one more or less artistic, while it potentially does say something (or a lot) about the skillset of the artist(s) involved.
Finally, I think your argument doesn't hold much water for another reason. You started this thread by asking if you can get saturated colors with a film not designed to do this. A quick way to get what you want would obviously be to crack open a brick of Ektar and get shooting. But if I apply your own reasoning, this would still constitute cheap art: you'd be using a speedy tool to get the job done. That the tool is a film-based one as opposed to a digital one doesn't make much of a difference conceptually.
The reason I'm picking on this is not to criticize you, personally. It's because I think you quite neatly captured in words a fundamental misconception among mostly amateur photographers (whom I'm one of, mind you!) about the relationship between art and skill or technical competence. This misconception is so deeply rooted and strongly advocated, that it seems to me that if an artist comes for advice to a place frequented mostly by amateur photographers, the advice they'll get is a lot of the time counterproductive instead of helpful. There will be lots of talk about technicalities, and rarely, if ever, does someone even pick up on the actual content of the artwork itself and the question what would be necessary to accomplish that goal. I guess I'm just warning you against falling into that trap as well. Ask yourself how bad it is if you do it the quick & dirty way. If you do it like that, you preserve much of your time and energies to work on the part of art that
really matters - its message, innate emotion, or whatever it is that moves the viewer.
Don't get me wrong - I like the technicalities and to a large extent, that's what a photo forum is for. It's for talking shop, and that's fun and interesting in itself. But if you talk about art and creativity, be very wary of getting lost in the woods of technique.