What makes working in a finite, very limited set of resources so rewarding is that those limitations turn mere programming into art.
You can't have art unless you constrain yourself somehow. Some people paint with dots only and some people express themselves in line art. If they allowed themselves any imaginable method that is applicable, they wouldn't be doing art. They could just take a photograph of a setting, and that photograph wouldn't say a thing to anyone.
Endless bit-twiddling and struct packing may turn trivial methods into huge optimization-ridden hacks and not get you too far vertically but given only few resources, those hacks are required to turn the theoretic approach into a real application that you can actually do useful work with. Those hacks often exhibit ingenious thinking and many examples of that approach art—and the best definitely are. And any field where ingenious thinking is required will push the whole field forward.
Similarly, for example, using a Python set as a rudimentary spell-checker is fast, easy, and convenient but it's no hack because it requires no hacking. It's like taking that photograph, or using a Ferrari to reverse from your garage out to the street and then driving it back. Which ingenious tricks are you required to accomplish that? None.
The bleeding edge has simply moved and it must lie somewhere these days, of course. Maybe computer graphics—although it has always demonstrated the capability to lead the bleeding edge so there's actually no news there. The fact is that the bleeding edge is more scattered. Early on, every computer user could feel and sense the bleeding edge because it revolved around tasks so basic that you could actually measure with your own eyes. Similarly, even a newbie programmer would face the same limitations early on and learn about how others had done it. Now you can stash gigabytes of data into your heap without realizing that you did, and wonder why the computer felt sluggish for a few seconds. Or how would you compare two state of the art photorealistic, interactive real-time 3D graphics demos? There's so much going on beyond the curtains that it's difficult to evaluate the works without having extensive domain knowledge in most the technologies used.
Findind the bleeding edge has become a field in itself.