Well, I started out as a science fiction and fantasy fan, and that's where my creative roots lie to this day. The writers that formed my literary sensibilities, and whom I first tried to emulate, were Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and Andre Norton. And the first fandom I became seriously involved in was one where the creators encouraged fanfic, but encouraged the writers thereof to create their own characters rather than using the canon characters (which is, I think, a distinguishing characteristic of much literary SF/Fantasy fan fiction, where the universe is as much the star of the show as the characters.) Using canon characters in EQ fandom in the 80's was looked down upon as much as creating Mary Sues is looked down upon in today's media fandoms. So even in my fannish endeavors, I was doing worldbuilding stuff, and that's always been one of the things I love most about writing.

re: indulgence vs. point, I've noticed that for me, the stories which are pure indulgence--what I think of as "Isn't my character so cool? Look how cool my character is!" stories--are the ones I'm most likely to bog down on and never finish, because there's no real character growth involved to pull the story to completion once the indulgence factor wears out. (Of course this is less of a problem in ficlets, but ficlets/vignettes have a whole different set of creative rules anyway, IMO.)

It's not like my critical voice is unerring, and I hope that it's still learning and improving along with the rest of the writerly me. But yeah, on the whole I trust it. I've been writing for twenty-plus years, and if nothing else, I've got a large weight of sheer practical experience to go by in judging what works and what doesn't.