alt Hacker News> ... and the audience will ooo and aah because a human figured out how to do that stuff under constraint.
Or because the audience appreciates the artists' emotion and creative effort embodied in what they're watching. The Razor1911 demo, released at Revision 2026, is a great example there - there's some neat effects but nothing groundbreaking, but that isn't the point. It's a retrospective on the group that produced it, and the surrounding scene, and that's what won it the competition.