The man rune connection is certainly sufficent to ensure that, like humans, an uz's two primary concerns are enough food, and a chance to reproduce.
Darkness is _cold_ but also _potential_; almost anything can emerge from the dark. So I tend to find the line 'praise then darkness and creation unfinished' indicative; the Uz are certainly plenty creative in terms of their use of magic, their tactics (you have to do a good bit more thinking to ambush people successful than to just cry 'stand and deliver'), and in their own forms - they've become Uzko, Enlo, sea, cave, snow, and jungle trolls, and Gods know what else since the Godswar from the original Uzuz. They also show a remarkable ability to cope with their neighbours, whoever those may be.
I'd say Uz creativity differs from a the human version mostly in terms of _concreteness_; humans make abstractions (and put much of the effort that would normally go into their children into those abstractions), and Uz just don't. The basic Uz question is 'is it important?'; if it isn't, who cares? (Something is important if it is has significant concrete effects *on that uz*.)
So kids are important; being strong is important; food is *very* important; whether Elmal and Yelm are the same guy or not is *not* important in the least. This is a weakness, becuase you can get a lot of power from abstractions, but it's a strength, too, because not getting tangled up in the abstractions about mystical purity is presumably why the Uz can mix and match magic systems so readily, and why their social system is so stable - it's a culture of results, rather than ideas.
If it's important and benefical, it's good. If it's important and not benefical, it's bad. If it's not important, it's not important - hence the lack of concern for things like cave trolls; the chaos taint isn't important. (Or Xolia Umbar - enlo _can_ be important, vs Zorak Zoran - enlo are not important.) And benefical on the scale of the individual uz, not abstractions like 'tribe' or 'race'. They don't form the abstraction 'tribe' in the first place, so the biggest group a particular uz will consider is the group where the uz can see the direct connections - I do this for you, you do that for him, he does that for me, but not 'future valuable considerations'; uz recognize debt, but not favours.
Zorak Zoran fights chaos becuase fighting chaos is what made ZZ important in the Godtime, not because chaos is important; chaos is just unusually vairied food. If Lunar aristocrats think walktapus is a delicacy, I can't imagine that trolls don't at least consider it _palatable_, and I have a sneaking suspicion that what you do with gorp if you're an enterprising dark troll is take it home and ferment it. (How? obviously, you eat just as much as ever you can hold and then run home and barf it into the vat before you digest all of it.)
Kyger Litor opposes chaos becuase the victory of chaos turns everything into something that isn't food, and if that happens, her children go hungry. (Life == food; if it's got hp, Uzuz can eat it, and Uzko can probably eat it. Death is just stopping life; pure chaos is not-at-all-like-life. So a little is ok - adds flavour - but too much is very bad.)
Literally, the word 'ettin' means 'the eaters', and I've found that name to be a useful one for the Uz.
I'm not sure Uzuz are completely cold and emotionless; I think they just have a very Uzuz centric view of what constitutes important.
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