it's all fair do's tho, scott.
i suppose it all comes down to context, when, who, where etc
a lot of photos, even 'classic' ones come down to it was taken at that moment, ie content/light/composition, sometimes grabbed onthe hoof so underexposed etc. but the photo 'works'
at the other end of that you have a shot that was planned, exposed, metered, set-up etc etc , but it still looks 'nice picture' instead of 'wow!'
if it's where you have the time, i would say worry more about the (whole) composition first - a technically-deficient snap can still be a great photo, but a technically-exquisite 'so what' pic is still a 'so what' pic - does that make sense
of course the whole thing about photography is there are all these 'rules', but everything in a situation is so fluid
and remeber too, it's all too easy to take lots of (possibly indifferent) pics these days - when you only had film to rely on, you had to make the pic 'count' more, simply because otherwise you were wasting film/processing costs!
i'm sure all of us could take 36exp digitally in no time at all, but how many of them would be good enough, irrespective of the complexity of the camera?
btw hope this doesn't count as a rant
just, you can take a great phot with an 'inferior' camera (well, as long's the lens is ok), just takes a wee bit mor thinking time
whereas,with a modern, bells'n'whistles jobbie it's incredibly easy to take an ultra-high-quality pic of little interest.
*funboythree* it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it *funboythree*