I personally hate lawn care. The most boring chore I can imagine in the yard. But at the moment I still have lawn on the property I just bought this spring. I plan to replace it all eventually, but I can only do one or two projects at a time.

I grow ornamental, so no more "practical" than a lawn, I suppose, but still far more interesting. Goals of ornamental gardens are different from the farming mindset. Flower beds do beg to have some kind of visually effective staging or setting, and traditionally that has been lawns.

But I am aiming for more of a cottage look, with perennial and annual groundcovers taking the place of lawn around the official flower beds and stepping stone paths meandering through it.

Yes, exactly this!

My goal is to have only a productive yard- fruit and nut trees, garden, a thicket of raspberries...less mowing, more food, more enjoyment (because I would rather dig in the dirt than mow the grass). The lawn, to me, is a pointless construction of capitalism.

I do recall reading how the first lawns were built by the French aristocracy and then copied by the British aristocrats as a sign of prestige because they wasted farmland by keeping it as a cut lawn which should that they were wealthy because they could afford to waste arable land. It is interesting to note that the farmland being wasted was usually the common lands that had been set aside for the working classes, so not only was the best use of the land being wasted but the rich were stealing it from the worker classes who would later buy into the same twisted scheme themselves for the sense of prestige attached to having a 'perfect lawn'. There was a worker's community where new immigrants often lived in my home city of Toronto called Cabbagetown, it got the name when the Polish immigrants came at the turn of the last century and dug up all the Victorian lawns so they could plant cabbages so they had something to eat. The area is right downtown and has become gentrified by rich professionals so the lawns are coming back but in a nod to the past there are a lot of 'decorative' cabbages planted there as well.

it is mindboggling how we pay to contribute to our private ecological disaster. I am in a no lawn no chemical zone

Look at some of the movies made in the early 1900's of blocks of tennament buildings , with no trees , no grass , no flowers - it's a life of poverty . Is that what you'd prefer ?