You bring joy to my heart, Sallymander, and bring back memories, too. When I first moved into my house in 1991, the yard was very sterile, too. Heck, I would wake up in the morning and it would be silent: there weren't even any birds singing! Very disconcerting, especially since I grew up in natural woodland. Outdoor insects at my "new" twelve year old house back then composed of mosquitoes and paper wasps (the kind that built nests under the roof eaves).
My approach has never been to attract certain bugs, or planting certain plants that attract certain bugs. I always strive for a natural balance in everything. "If you build it, they will come." I want to have everything (plants, insects and people) live happily in my yard, so I have diverse plantings, with no particular goal in mind, except nature itself. You never know what might turn up, the unusual moth or butterfly (adult or caterpillar), predatory insects you've never heard of before, a myriad of types of spiders and beetles, fungi and lichens of all kinds, and on and on. When everything lives together, there is likely always something that will nibble on a your lilies (for instance) but never any devastation or cause for concern. And the paper wasps? They still visit my flowers, but have gone somewhere else to build their nests. Now I have all kinds of different bees and wasps in my yard.
And yes, building the soil is part of the holistic scheme. For many years, I transported pickup loads of oak leaves from my parents' two acre wooded yard every fall, to incorporate into the soil and as mulching.
My goal is to let nature take the lead in my organized yard. Don't force things to grow where they don't want to, by needing to regularly water, feed, or futz over. Not that there is inherently anything wrong with that, but at the same time, you also force yourself to be diligent about catching problems like disease or insect infestations that can become problematic.
I joke about this, but it is true:
two of my neighbors have hummingbird feeders. The hummingbirds visit them for the sugar, and then they come to my yard for real food (and to nest).
