Mine would be, that the software was simple and rather bad looking in general, so as a hobbyist developer that level of sophistication seemed achievable. (Not that I ever did achieve it, but it was not discouraging like today)
In terms of simplicity a lot has to do with the capabilities of the hardware. The computers were much more limited, so the ceiling was lower as compared to today.
Example would be something like making a game. When I started coding, having just text on screen was far from being the best, but it was not totally out of place. These days 3D or nice looking pixel art is basically the baseline.