Creativity Within Structure

I was making my way down a wooden walkway on an early morning photo outing - backpack and tripod in hand – when I was struck by this eerie scene that appeared before me.  A perfect moment, I instinctively reached for my iPhone and snapped off this. Had I taken the time to pull the equipment out and set everything up on the tripod, would I have grabbed a better image? Would it have the same wow factor had I used the better equipment? Would I have missed the sun in that particular spot in the sky? At what point does "gear" get in the way of creativity? Should inspiration drive the hardware choices? At a recent photo club outing, the leader was explaining why he continued to use older photography equipment on his hikes. His intention was to always travel light. His tripod was small; it featured no ball head mountings or other bells and whistles, very bare bones. His camera was a point and shoot with an attached lens. He would simply stoop down at an interesting scene and fir