honestly, the first one you described sounds like the far better model to try and turn into a code base. No boiler plate, no frivolous framework jigging, distilled to its raw functional essence. A simple system of emergent complexity strikes me as a much better candidate for intelligence than a kludge that gains complexity from just having a lot of parts and rules to begin with.
Small system aren't always simple or easy to understand. Famous code examples are Duff's Device [1] or the "wtf" fast inverse square root function [2]. Both functions are just a few lines long but usually leave people scratching their heads until they learn about the trick.
Especially with Demoscene code, it's common to exploit all kinds of specific hardware effects or re-parse the assembly code to a different instruction sequence [3]. This kind of stuff may be a lot more complex than a larger system, it just hides its complexity in a compressed representation.
