For health reasons, a year or two ago I had to cut hard on carbohydrates and so, amongst other things, started eating a lot more salad so I invested a lot of time and effort (and experimentation) into figuring out nice ways of doing salad.
Let's just say that it's perfectly possible to do very tasty salads, even without using sauces (which is seldom a healthy way of doing it) and, further, you can make quite a number of different varieties of tasty salads if you're willing to go a bit further out in your choice of ingredients than lettuce and tomato.
Good thing, too, because otherwise my diet nowadays would've been horribly bland.
I come from a country with quite the tradition for good bread (Portugal), so I actually miss it (the good kind of bread, with some butter or cheese), but nowadays it's just a once in a blue moon treat.
However I do feel the same as you describe for other things: so much of the almost pure carbohydrate foodstuff is just cheap filler and once you wean yourself off of it, eventually you get to a point were it's really just bland and boring. Similarly, nowadays the heavy sugary stuff is just too much in terms of taste and actually unappealing.
The most shocking thing for me is how little I now eat of carbohydrates whilst feeling just fine, which to me shows just how excessive the amounts I was eating before - from bread twice a day to some kind of carbohydrate filler with every main meal, all quite similar to most people around here - were.