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it's a prime example of (extreme) limitations leading to creativity and ingenuity
Absolutely. Mind you, the whole (too long) stretch where PC software was locked into the 640k memory prison was such a period for PC software in general. Whole industries of clever innovation crashed when the 386 came out.
itsbruce-
Indeed. It was on my dad's Amstrad 286 running MS-DOS that I really learned to program. My mum's boss had a Mac and I wanted one, so I started building a clone of System 7 in Turbo Pascal. I learned how to write my own mouse driver using interrupts, worked out how to create XOR masks to make mouse cursors display without obliterating the background underneath, and how to switch sections of the background to memory and/or disk so I could make windows moveable and resizeable.
When my dad bought a 386 and Windows 3.1 came out I sort of lost interest.
Of course then they invented the World Wide Web and for several years front end development was entirely made of extreme limitations, and I had the best time ever trying to build the impossible.
bq
I find Doom modding fascinating, it's a prime example of (extreme) limitations leading to creativity and ingenuity, and the ideas people come up with are just incredible (I'm sure there is lots of dross released also)