Why not both? Back in 2006 I helped someone complete a Flash puzzle game. The whole thing was a an interesting programming experience. His lead developer had family issues to tend to and I stepped in. He would come up with game-play ideas and I would prototype them while also working completing the whole game. It was a blast. The ideas that he would bring to me were greatly influenced by what he thought I could pull off in the alotted time. After I was done, he later hired some other devs and told me he found himself limiting his ideas because those guys weren't as good at implementing them. In that respect he definitely hit technical limitations even though he was working on non-technically challenging games on a well known platform.

Similarly, there was no state-of-the-art coding in this game:

* http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

They had plenty of technical challenges pushing the performance of ActionScript in browsers at the time in order to keep the game moving smoothly.