Word Count

I'm curious: how many times have I ever spoken the word 'the?'
I'll bet it's tons of times more than obscure words like marmalade and insubordination, and more similar to other articles ('a' and 'an') or conjunctions and super common colloquialisms like 'and' and 'so' and 'like' and 'really.'
I mean, I probably speak multiple thousands of words a day, and articles and conjunctions plus pronouns and names are the vast majority of the words.

Now, think about this.
The English language, the largest language by vocabulary that has EVER existed, has over 1 million words, not including different conjugations of the words.
The average high school grad has an active vocabulary of 15,000 words. 30,000 is recommended to get a good score on the SAT, and most college/grad students have near 40-60,000.
The estimated variety of language in Shakespeare indicates that he knew and used 18-25,000 different words in his collected works. Now, he wrote some amazing stuff, with some words that make absolutely no sense to me. His writing speaks of a depth of knowledge of the use of the English language, and he uses some very creative verbs in unique ways, and I generally find that he uses words that I do not see every day, and were probably similarly uncommon in his time. He was actually the first person to write a serious work of literature in English, which was considered the lower class language of the time compared to Latin and French, the languages of the court and the nobility.
Now, my question is this:
Why does modern art and literature and poetry SUCK in terms of literary creativity!
I'm not talking about coming up interesting things to say, I'm talking about using creative ways to say them.
I mean, seriously, when was the last time you heard a song or a poem that wasn't about a woman who left you or gazing at the sky or crying tears of joy or sorrow or whatever?
You could probably come up with a list of 500 words that if they were removed from the English language, we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, especially songwriters!!
Although that might be nice, because then maybe Bono would stop talking.
Among them, boring, too-many-meanings verbs like : set, have, do, and go.
A language with a MILLION WORDS ought to provide us with a better way to express what we want to communicate than the 3-6% that we actually use.

Maybe that's why no one understands anybody else; we learn a certain amount of words and then stop learning how to communicate.