I have to disagree. I consider part of my job to be some SEO (not my primary task and neither the most important, but I take care of it at my company) and its definitely the first part of what you sketch. And trying to clean all the second part stupid stuff someone else may have done before.

I don't see it as a game against Google... I try to make our sites as useful for humans as possible, and hope Google agrees with a decent enough ranking so humans can visit it and enjoy the content. But when it doesn't, then the game is between me and the "other SEOs" who may not see the point of making something useful for readers, not machines.