Right, building things out of redstone more closely analagous to building things out of doped silicon, rather than out of discrete components or ICs. Building logic using pistons vs torches always struck me as being a bit like the difference between RTL and TTL, but maybe that's stretching an analogy too far. The point is engineering a digital device out of redstone requires tradeoffs in space and speed and complexity that I think make it qualify as a real form of engineering. Made all the more impressive for how impractical and pointless it really is.