But lets not lose sight that without a little bit of cleverness and overengineering we'd still programming in machine code. Also it seems to me that pretty much every popular programming language out there (PHP, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Erlang, etc.) is the result of overengineering and cleverness.
The few languages that aren't overengineered are the ones that either have a very specific domain (JavaSript), slow to change standards (C), or are very new (Clojure).
OP's idea also doesn't sound very over engineered to me. The whole draw loop thing is simply a convention and not an obvious one. I've taught many a student who stumbled on the idea of the render loop because there's simply nothing natural or obvious about it.
In the real world everything happens at once, there is no update-render-loop. Snapshoting the state of a multithreaded physics engine at discrete intervals in order to render the game state is much closer to a model of how we perceive a fully concurrent reality.
