And then there’s good old Chris Sawyer, writing an entire (fairly complex) game completely in Assembly, because he wanted the (actually kind of computationally heavy) game to still work on potato hardware.

It’s possible that the dynamic generation might be more maintainable than a lookup list, though.

With a lookup list, you may need to recalculate the whole thing every time you make a small change. And a significant change, like giving the user a new choice/parameter to adjust, may not only require recalculating the lookup table, but also exponentially increasing the size of the lookup table.

Whereas with a dynamically generated result, small adjustments to the values likely wouldn’t require any modification of the actual code at all, and adding a new choice/parameter would be fairly straightforward – it just needs to be plugged into the formula, maybe add an extra step or two in the algorithm.