I love the challenge and accomplishment of bringing a little brown speck to life. That always seems like a complete miracle, and I get to nurse the little babies along under lights in my bedroom. Sometimes i'm even reluctant to let them go outside!
For some reason, I find seeds and seedlings to be thrilling examples of participating in the miracle of life, but houseplants just seem like a chore. If I didn't start it from seed, it's like taking care of someone else's child. That sounds illogical even to me, but there it is.
Besides ...After losing whole trays of perennial seeds as a newbie, stubburness kicked in!
When I look longingly at some plant in a nursery, that I've found hard to start from seed, just BUYING it seems like giving up and admitting failure. The satisfaction of starting from seed doubles or triples if it took me 2-3 years of trying, just to get any surviviors.
Establishing bare root plants sent by generous online friends still seems "challenging" enough to me that I feel satisfaction when they live through the first winter. I'm not sure why that seems different from bringing home a potted plant from a nursery.
Maybe "keeping them alive" seems enough like "giving them life" that it satisifes my maternal instincts.
And I bought patented baby perennial Lavatera once, online, that were so small when they arrived that it felt like raising them from seed. It took months indoors before they were clearly going to live. That was my first year gardening in decades, so their survival really was a kind of miracle. (It turned out that either the online nursery mis-labelled them, or they all totally reverted before their first blooming ... either way, they are pretty and hardy where I live.)
Once my SO brought home some pansy transplants, and once she talked me into buying a peony. But they seem like houseguests instead of "my children"!
I also seem to get some kind of collector's pleasure out of having a big box of seeds I hope to find garden room for "some day". Like a treasure chest of magic, genetic jewels.