Why bother with learning a special "image editing" application ?
Why can't folks make good looking pictures from just code ?
Algorithms implemented in soft synths need to take certain things like aliasing into account and if every musicians had to bother with that, there would be much less EDM for you to enjoy.
I switched to termite when I rethought my setup to minimize my usage of the mouse. I don't think I would have changed for cosmetic features or benchmark reasons.
William Sethare has done a good amount of research into adaptatively tuning music so that the intervals are always simple ratios. You can find some examples of this here : https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html
Unfortunately some sound examples are missing but a few of them are still online.
Have you tried any of the modern games other than the two you linked ? A lot of the games being made right now are shorter and punchier than the classic infocom games.
Recording reverb from real space is as simple as recording an impulse (firing a gun or anything that makes a short high intensity noise) in a room and then convolving that with the audio you want to add reverb to.
The only limits to this is how close to a perfect impulse you can generate.