I think the main goal of eve is precisely to help people "think computationally". Part of that is finding a better fundamental model than imperative programming. The other part is removing incidental complexity (DB connectors, etc). If you dismiss either part you'll get exactly what we've been getting for the past 40 years: micro-optimizations.

But, I agree with you, the former-- changing the fundamental computation model-- is the more exciting (and harder) of the two.