Each of us as to deal with this in our own way. My thoughts are it depends on the expected audience. There are many hats one can wear, “artist”, “photojournalist”, “documentation”…
To me, PL4 is a tool, and can help with any and all of the above.
When I did photos for my college newspaper, I quickly got to learn what they wanted.
When I worked for article and photos for magazines, I did what they wanted/needed.
When I took photos for the hospital I volunteer at in India, ditto.
I guess my current “goal” is to create the best looking images I can, without making them look like they were obviously manipulated. I would like people to think the image they see is straight from my camera. I’m no expert at Photoshop, I did learn how to do what I needed from Lightroom, most other editors I find too clinical and boring, and PL4 feels more and more like an extension of my camera, making the images people see what I “saw” that made me want to take the photo.
(My Nikon, Canon, and Fuji cameras have an endless collection of settings that can be manipulated to create almost any given effect I might be after. My M10 has a bare minimum of that kind of stuff. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy the Leica so much.)
One of the reasons I enjoy Joanna’s photos so much, is that if I were standing where she was, and opened my eyes, her photo is what I would see. To me, she manipulates the controls to make the photo seem even more convincing that it is/was real. This is especially true of her LF images.
So, what is “real”? If I walk up to a building and photograph it, and angle my camera upwards to show more of the building, the resulting image looks wrong because the “vertical lines” are mostly angled, no longer vertical. If Joanna raises the lens on her view camera, or I use my perspective control lens on my camera, the vertical lines can all be kept vertical. When I view the finished image later, it’s technically “perfect”, with the vertical lines not tapering inward at the top because of perspective, but I often feel something is “strange” about the image, specifically because all those lines remain vertical. I love that effect, but it brings up strange feelings… so, which is more “real”, and does it matter?