Are Spore Galactic Adventures only about filming

No.

The Creature Creator was released as a quasi-demo shortly before the actual game. Even though it is something you have to pay for, it was released with the intention of users buying it to play with while they waited for the final game - with most stores offering rebates on the purchase price of this "demo". While it contains many of the options for body parts found in the full retail version, it lacks many others.

For example:

• Various body parts acquired through play will not be available.
• Earlier/Later stage creature customizations will not be available.
• Buildings/Vehicles will also not be available.

Additionally, the added parts that can be found in the "Creepy and Cute" expansion pack are not compatible with the Creature Creator.

I would strongly suggest buying the full version, as it's very often on sale, over the Creature Creator.

I don't know about running Spore and Spore GA under wine, but under their normal host OS, to play GA, you have to launch GA from its own installed shortcut and you need to have the GA disk. If you don't, it will run normal Spore. From your description, it sounds like either a) the launcher you are using is for normal spore, not the GA launcher, or b) its DRM isn't seeing the GA disk, so it is just going running normal Spore.

That was one advantage to installing GA--- it "cracked" normal Spore so the Spore disk was no longer needed at start up to play the normal Spore game. Useful when you wanted to travel but not worry about losing your GA disk.