Simply wrong. I suggest you actually look at the source code to bitcoind (start with script.cpp, and the validation methods in main.cpp/core.cpp which call it).

My mistake. I was under the impression the whitelist was quite restrictive, but maybe not.

Thats not correct. They're executed, and fancy scripts are sometimes used on the network.

Common wallet software just uses templates to create and decide which scripts are relevant to them— but the network itself absolutely does validate them.