I enjoy the Atari 2600 because it is very well engineered. The 6502 processor has a wonderful instruction set, and the TIA is an ingenious solution to drawing video graphics with such a small number of transistors.
I have been developing video games in the Unity game engine, which uses a high level language called C#, and it is fun to do incredible things with so few lines of code, but it honestly doesn't feel special.
I spend a lot of time on the Atari because it has such a big community. I know Unity also has a community, but it's much more corporate.
For me, the Atari 2600 /is/ a challenge, but I don't develop almost exclusively on it because it is such a challenge. For instance I am very annoyed that the system only has 128 bytes of RAM, and there are only 76 CPU clock cycles per scanline. I am also very frustrated that the maximum size your cartridge banks can be are 4 kilobytes. If the 2600 had a faster processor, more RAM, and a bigger address space, I honestly don't think I'd ever leave it. The fact it only has 2 hardware sprites is not an issue for me.
I find modern consoles and platforms to be very unparsimonious and inefficient with their resources and architectures. Like Hennessey and Patterson (?) of the RISC-V processor foundation say, right now, because Moore's Law doesn't apply anymore, we have to return to a lot of the design priorities that were manifested in computer systems like the Atari 2600 which are Domain Specific - they have a very specialised architecture which does a small number of things /very well/.
I suppose that's the reason why the 2600 is so special to me. It only tries to do one thing very well, and it really succeeds at that. The more I work on the 2600, the more beautiful I think it is. It's so easy to use and its architecture helps you achieve what you want to do.
I feel like the dawn of the era of the minicomputer, say, the mid-1960s, up until say... the early 1980s is my favourite era of engineering, both at the mainframe/minicomputer and microcomputer level. There are so many beautiful processors and computer architectures that were realised during that time. The DEC minicomputers like the PDP-8 and PDP-11, the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64, the Atari 2600, and the Z80 processor, as well as the Motorola 680X series of microprocessors were all such beautiful beautiful inventions. I look at processors today and they're just churned out for making money instead of being carefully and beautifully engineered.
I also like the education and 'hope' for computers that characterise the culture of the mid-60s to early-80s. You had to prosecute an /argument/ for the introduction of computers into everyday life, and it wasn't always taken for granted (why get the newest phone? Honestly: why?). Entire documentaries and TV series were invented for explaining the purpose and need for computers, and a lot of this culture was reflected in the applications towards which computers were put, like the Atari 2600. We have none of that now.
I feel very passionately about the Atari 2600, but I still haven't really discovered the /essence/ of that passion, so I'm still working away at my stupid game, and maybe the next game, until I really try and grasp the core of what is driving me.