Without knowing the rules there is no awareness of breaking them. This strips you completely of the bonus bad-boy pleasure from breaking stuff
But kidding aside: what you call “rules”, I call guidelines. Because that’s what they really are: guidelines and recipes which you can apply to all kinds of (possibly unknown) musical territories knowing that they will work. It’s much more efficient than “developing/discovering the wheel” by yourself over and over again …
For me Music Theory is simply a map produced by other explorers. I can use it to navigate quickly from A to B, but nothing stops me from putting it down and walking on a spree. And when I’m lost, the map is again there and rescues me.