Maybe I’m just interpreting things differently, but in the original movie, everything was a visual representation of actual computer technology. Like you said, the programs looked like their programmers, and the I/O tower was the interface with the real world. No one “wrote” those visualizations, that’s just what the inside of a computer “looked like” from the inside.

Tron 2.0 expanded on this by showing visual representations of the Internet, computer viruses, disk corruption, devices with minimal memory, backup servers, etc. Again, no one created these visualizations, it’s just what the inside of computers looked like.

But then Tron: Legacy came along and said “Flynn created this world in his off-hours”. I’m not arguing that he created them with god-like abilities from the inside, I’m just arguing that he did create them. It’s no longer just “what technology looks like from the other side of the screen”, now it’s “whatever Flynn decided to create”. So now the major plot point is that the ISOs are the one thing he didn’t create. So if there’s no technological equivalent of it being cloudy or raining within the Grid, we can just say “Flynn made it that way”.

I feel like this is wasted potential because we could’ve had a Tron-style visualization of WiFi, quantum computing, AI, etc. The Grid could’ve had better graphics with each new movie and it would’ve made sense in-universe because computing power had increased. But if the Grid is just what Flynn wrote before he died… that’s it. That’s the Grid. It can’t change.

But hey, I hope you’re right, I hope they continue with the “visualizations from the other side of the screen” in future movies. But I think Tron: Legacy intentionally dumbed it down for audiences so it became a “trapped in a video game” trope rather than visualizations of actual technology.