[nonethewiser]

The happy accidents in this case aren't even directly discernable either. It's not like you say "oh that little random smudge is interesting." It's just an impression you get.

Old school animation has the same quality. It's all hand drawn so not quite as exact. It looks fantastic. You wouldn't really even call it flawed, just less formulaic.

I guess that makes me think "how could we model that with computers?" I mean we could make a gradient less smooth. We could add different sorts of noise. It sounds quite complicated but in theory a computer could do this. Practically speaking it may never be worth trying to implement. Kind of a 80/20 issue. That is, you could do a ton of extra work to bump the quality a bit but people are already pretty happy with it so why bother?