I'm not super familiar with the history of aviation, but by the end of the 90s, 3D accelerators became widespread. This meant that 3D became available to the m

I'm not super familiar with the history of aviation, but by the end of the 90s, 3D accelerators became widespread. This meant that 3D became available to the masses, but the only way you could render graphics was the DirectX/OpenGL way, with triangles,Z-Buffers,vertex/pixel shaders. Unfortunately this meant that other techniques, like voxel raycasting, spline surfaces and other weird techniques couldn't be accelerated, and became much less prominent. So yeah, the analogy stands that 3D transitioned from a period of whimsical experimentation to a "this-is-how-we-do-things" mindset in the timeframe, while a number of otherwise interesting solutions fell by the wayside.