The other side of that is that there are certain kinds of recursive organic structures that are very hard to make with a modeling tool, but can procedurally gen

The other side of that is that there are certain kinds of recursive organic structures that are very hard to make with a modeling tool, but can procedurally generated with a little bit of code. Making realistic trees is hard, but I've made cartoonishly-plausible trees in POV-Ray without much effort. (Define a level-0 tree as a leaf attached to a twig; i.e. a flattened sphere stuck onto a tapered cylinder. Define a level N tree as two level N-1 trees transformed and rotated to project from the end of a branch.) Making a plausible human face with just a text editor, on the other hand, I wouldn't know where to start.