I appreciate your concern for fish welfare, but I can't completely agree with this. Of course it's there to look pretty to him, and if making it so is a vanity project, then we're all guilty. That's the whole reason most of us keep fish in aquariums. If the first, last, and only thing we care about is the welfare of fish, we would leave them in the wild. Wild fish don't need us to be their guardians; they just want to be left alone (with the exception of endangered species who are losing their habitat, and very few of us are equipped to truly help those).
Making fish live in a little box is a huge responsibility, yes, and many don't take that responsibility seriously enough. I'm with you there. Sometimes our efforts to beautify their homes can cause temporary discomfort to the fish, but so does our decision to keep them in the first place. As long as it's temporary, they'll most likely be OK. I doubt that the fish in my tank have any idea that they aren't in a real rice paddy, if fish even think about that sort of thing. But most of those fish were wild-caught, and they sure didn't like it at first.
Rocky, my advice is to make your tank beautiful enough to make you happy, while minimizing stress to the fish. There are a lot of ways to do that. You're going to make some mistakes; try not to make the same one twice. I think you'll get there.
