[jrexilius]

I don't think it's so much dealing with resource constraints that made it more exciting, but the fact that you were often originating things, rather than (haphazardly) stitching together exisiting, known works of others. It's always more exciting to create something from scratch rather than "just add water and stir" sorta thing.

[edit to add:] Although, another part of having to understand memory usage, for example, meant that you really had to understand the fundamental building materials you were working with. Where as now, no one has the man hours to really understand the stack of tens of thousands of lines of node shit you have to glue together to do some basic task.. you feel more excited when you are really mastering the materials, I think..