I think the key for 'scene' type demos is more that the code is run in some particular environment, and the impressive part is how far the demo stretches the capabilities of the environment, and how creatively it presses against the constraints.

280 characters of R+ggplot generating art is at least cute. It's a powerful environment, but constrained input data.

I mean, no one's going to say that a demo like kkrieger isn't impressive (the famed "96KB FPS") despite using 3D rendering APIs and such, right?