Life isn't much of an "interestingness" maximiser. Expecting to produce more than a tiny fraction of the total potential for interestingness in this universe seems as though it would be rather unreasonable.

I agree that a paperclip maximiser would be more boring than an ordinary entropy-maximising civilization - though I don't know by how much - probably not by a huge amount - the basic problems it faces are much the same - the paperclip maximiser just has fewer atoms to work with.