A little bit of everything you mention. Consciously, I just wanted to write something I liked. Yet using brute force did teach me compositional skills I was able to try later. I got a better sense of which chords would proceed from others. This let me reduce the search space in the future. Unfortunately, it also made my compositions have a mood that was too similar, because I was re-using the same chord patterns.

In the end, brute force gave me empirical knowledge of interesting chord structures, but that didn't fix my struggles with melody and rhythm.